Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life of Writing 9780292767362

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Mario Vargas Llosa

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« By Raymond Leslie Williams »

Mario Vargas Llosa

A Life of Writing

University of Texas Press

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Copyright © 2014 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2014 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713–7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Libr ary of Congr ess Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Raymond L. Mario Vargas Llosa : a life of writing / by Raymond Leslie Williams. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-75812-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Vargas Llosa, Mario, 1936—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PQ8498.32.A65Z943 2014 863′.64—dc23 2013048676 doi:10.7560/758124

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Contents

Preface vii Part I. An Intellectual Biography

1

Part II. A Novelist for the Twenty-First Century Part III. Rereading Vargas Llosa Epilogue

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121

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Appendix 1. An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa Appendix 2. Fiction of Mario Vargas Llosa

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Appendix 3. Selected Essays of Mario Vargas Llosa

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Notes 211 Works Cited 221 Index

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Preface

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obel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the major Latin American writers and public intellectuals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is also one of the most prolific, widely read, and polemical writers of the Spanish language of any period. Among his predecessors in receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature who wrote in Spanish—Octavio Paz, Camilo José Cela, Gabriel García Márquez, Vicente Aleixandre, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriela Mistral, Jacinto Benavente, and José Echegaray—Vargas Llosa is the only one who is still living, actively engaged in writing and the focus of cultural and political debate throughout the Hispanic world. Among the writers of the much-heralded 1960s Boom of the Latin American novel— Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, José Donoso—Vargas Llosa is the only one still actively engaged in the writing of fiction: Cortázar, Fuentes, and Donoso are now deceased, and García Márquez, in his eighties, has become less visible and productive in recent years. In November 2010, approximately one month after receiving his telephone call from Peter Englund on behalf of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, however, Vargas Llosa, at the age of seventy-four, came forth with his sixteenth novel, El sueño del celta. Since the publication of José Miguel Oviedo’s pioneer early book, Mario Vargas Llosa: La invención de una realidad (1970 and 1982), critical studies on Vargas Llosa’s work have been continual and abundant; these analyses offer a wide range of formal study, as well as an eclectic body of textual, political, feminist, and psychological readings. Of the latter, Roy Boland has published Mario Vargas Llosa: Oedipus and the Papa State (1988), the first book-length consideration of trauma in Vargas Llosa’s work.

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To some extent, this book is a consideration of the literary consequences, in the twenty-first century, of Vargas Llosa’s Oedipus complex as introduced in Boland’s book. My readings have been informed by the work of Cathy Caruth (Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History), Sigmund Freud (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), Arthur W. Frank (The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics), Judith Hehrman (Trauma and Recovery), and David Aberbach (Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis). My intention is not to “apply” any of their theories; rather, my understanding of trauma and how it works owes much to these informed scholars. A recent volume on the politics of Vargas Llosa, published in 2010 under the title Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics (Juan E. De Castro and Nicholas Birns, editors) is testimony to the ongoing current interest in the work of one of Latin America’s most controversial Nobel laureates. More recently, Efraín Kristal and John King have co-edited a volume of the latest valuable readings of Vargas Llosa’s novels. This current study, however, is the first singleauthored book on Vargas Llosa’s complete twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury fiction. In recent years, several lines of critical thought or narratives have dominated the public and scholarly image of this writer and his work. On the one hand, journalists and some scholars have claimed, since the 1970s, that the literary success of Vargas Llosa and other writers of the 1960s Boom is primarily the product of slick marketing by multinational publishing companies. This narrative, which began with early commentaries by the renowned and now deceased Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, who believed that writers dedicated to “transculturation,” such as José María Arguedas, Juan Rulfo, and García Márquez, practiced a more valid form of literary expression than the more cosmopolitan Fuentes and Vargas Llosa. Hernán Vidal’s book on the 1960s Boom also argues that the fiction of Vargas Llosa and his cohorts was of no more, and perhaps less, merit than a long list of other Latin American writers who have been overshadowed by the marketing expertise of multinational companies operating in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. A second line of thought or critical narrative is slightly more forgiving: Vargas Llosa admittedly wrote three novels with complex and nuanced representations of Peruvian and Latin American reality during the 1960s Boom—La ciudad y los perros (1963), La casa verde (1966), and Conversación en La Catedral (1969)—but since then his work has been less complex and significant. Within this line of thought are a substan-

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tive set of critical pieces that are basically negative toward Vargas Llosa’s writing. A third line of thought, common among U.S. academics in Latin American studies, is that Vargas Llosa simply has become too politically conservative and narrow to be of interest today; these commentaries often claim that his vision as a writer is negative toward women, ethnic minorities, and other groups that do not belong to the social and political elites of Peru or other parts of Latin America. These three broadly described critical narratives contain several kinds of more in-depth, detailed analysis and argument, some of which I find useful and productive for the reading of this author, as will be discussed in parts I and II of this book. The central focus of this book, however, is to question the critical lacunae and critical misrepresentations of Vargas Llosa’s writing of the twenty-first century. The structure of this study is an outline for my engagement with these discussions. In part I, “An Intellectual Biography,” I provide a chronological overview of Vargas Llosa’s complete work, with particular attention to the writer’s political essays and interviews on political topics. Thus, I will trace his political thought in essays, interviews, and novels as it has changed from his strident leftist declarations in the 1960s to his repudiation of some of these ideas in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early twenty-first century. I will also sketch out Vargas Llosa’s polemical ideas on indigenous groups in Latin America. I begin part I with a detailed description of the writer’s traumatic childhood and later connect this childhood experience with his lifetime critique of authority figures. Part II, “A Novelist for the Twenty-First Century,” is the centerpiece of this book and focuses on Vargas Llosa’s five novels published in the late twentieth and twenty-first century: Lituma en los Andes (1993), La fiesta del Chivo (2000), El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003), Travesuras de la niña mala (2006), and El sueño del celta (2010). I discuss the ways in which these works are comparable in complexity, nuance, scope, and significance to his more generally lauded works of the 1960s—La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, and Conversación en La Catedral. My focus on the five novels of the twenty-first century makes this book the first comprehensive study of Vargas Llosa’s novels with emphasis on the later fiction. In part III, “Rereading Vargas Llosa,” I provide an overview of Vargas Llosa’s eleven other novels, from La ciudad y los perros (1963) to Los

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cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997), the fictional work of the twentieth century. I do not discuss these novels work by work. Rather, I establish some topics that are constant throughout Vargas Llosa’s career, and offer analysis of them in the context of several works. These topics are the novels that are his “entertainments,” his work as a modernist and a postmodernist, and his work reread in an ecocritical context. In the epilogue, I have added a personal touch to this study of Vargas Llosa and his work, beginning with a description of Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize week in Stockholm in December 2010. In the remainder of the epilogue I move backward in time, from 2011 to 1968, describing and quoting from my formal interviews and informal conversations with Vargas Llosa. In the process, I offer final brief reflections on the writer and his work. This is my third book on this author, and over the years, numerous individuals—more than I can possibly name here—have contributed to my work on Mario Vargas Llosa. As is evident in part I and the interviews I cite in part III, I have been fortunate to count on the good will, patience, and time of Mario Vargas Llosa and his wife, Patricia. Patricia and Vargas Llosa’s secretarial staff in Lima, headed by Rosario de Bedoya, also have been exceptionally generous and helpful in my research trips to Peru. Lucía Muñoz Nájar and María Carmen Ghezzi, as a part of that staff, were also kind and helpful. Vargas Llosa’s nowdeceased mother, Dora de Vargas, generously gave me the only interview she ever conceded to an academic or journalist. I cite this interview briefly in this book, and I thank the family for that special opportunity in May 1991. Dr. Peter  T. Johnson and his colleagues at the library of Princeton University kindly made Vargas Llosa’s letters and manuscripts available to me. When I was an undergraduate student at Washington State University, Professors Robert Knox and Wolfgang A. Luchting introduced me to Vargas Llosa’s work, and I remain indebted to them to this day. Knox, in fact, first made me aware of Vargas Llosa’s concept of the “communicating vessels” as it appeared in none other than the obscure Spanish novelist Pérez de Ayala. José Miguel Oviedo was never a classroom teacher of mine, but I have benefited so much over the years from his informed work on Vargas Llosa that I feel obliged to recognize him as a mentor. Much closer personal mentors, John  S. Brushood and Raymond D. Souza, have contributed much to my ability to read and write about Vargas Llosa in the early stages. Conversations with R.  H. Moreno-Durán, Darío Jaramillo, Ger-

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mán Vargas, Arthur Flemming, Raymond D. Souza, John Ganim, Malcom Bader, and Carlos Fuentes have afforded valuable insights, over the years, about Vargas Llosa, his interlocutors, and related subjects. For this most recent study in particular, I am grateful for the support for my research efforts provided by the chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies, David Herzberger, and the dean of the college, Stephen Cullenberg, at the University of California, Riverside, as well as Arnold Baas at UCLA. Graduate students in several recent seminars provided an ideal dialogic setting for my work on Vargas Llosa’s twenty-first-century novels to advance, and I am particularly appreciative of the insights of Diana Dodson Lee and Charles Stuart. Readers César Ferreira, Arthur Flemming, and Thomas Schneider improved the manuscript and research assistants Enrique Salas-Durazo, Julio Enríquez-Arnelas, and Judy Jiménez were always efficient and reliable. Without the exceptional support and sacrifice of my wife, Pamela, this project would be unthinkable. I thank Casey Kittrell of the University of Texas Press for his superb work in taking the manuscript through the final stages to publication. I certainly do not wish to hold any of these individuals accountable for any shortcomings the book may have; rather, I hope they may find some satisfaction that suitably rewards their friendly cooperation.

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Part I

An Intellectual Biography

The Early Years (1936– 1974)

I

n the early 1920s a young Peruvian named Ernesto Vargas Maldonado abandoned the city where he was born—Lima, Peru—to experience life in the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires. He had won the lottery and his adventuresome spirit led him abroad. He probably had a good time in this crown jewel of South America as long as he had money in his pocket. Faced with the daily reality of economic survival, however, he decided to enroll in vocational training to be an airline pilot. He worked for a few years in the merchant marines in Argentina and, after deciding to return to his native Peru, obtained a job as a radio telegrapher for a company called Panagra at the airport of Tacna, located in the southern region of this nation. Soon after assuming his new duties in Tacna, he met and fell in love with a young woman, Dora Llosa Ureta, on vacation with her family. She belonged to one of the highly respected families—commonly identified as a distinguida familia (distinguished family)—in Arequipa. One year later, in 1935, Ernesto Vargas and Dora Llosa were married. In an intensely class-conscious society, Ernesto Vargas belonged to what was considered a good family (familia bien), but one that had lost much of its economic power and prestige because of the vicissitudes of Peruvian politics. Born in 1904 in Lima, which was a traditional and conservative social environment at the time, Vargas received a rigidly conservative Catholic education at the Colegio Guadalupe de Lima, a high school operated by German priests with a reputation for old-school discipline. Ernesto Vargas’s father, Marcelo Vargas, had been a supporter and follower

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of a local boss (caudillo), Augusto Durán; consequently, the economic security and stability of the Vargas family depended on the success of Durán’s unstable political career. Unfortunately, in the first half of the twentieth century, political and economic life was unpredictable at best and chaotic at worst, and these vicissitudes directly affected the Vargas family. Ernesto Vargas had a difficult childhood, and was forced to drop out of school to work because of the family’s precarious financial situation. His job was in a shoe repair shop. During those years, Ernesto’s father taught him some of the basic skills needed to be a radio operator, laying the groundwork for the boy’s vocational training a few years later in Buenos Aires. The seeds that produced the bitter and resentful adult Ernesto Vargas—far from an ideal father figure—were sown during this unhappy adolescence. As for the fact that Ernesto Vargas had an adventurer’s spirit, his son, the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, attributes this to a family trait that goes back to the arrival of the first Vargas in the Colonial period, during the sixteenth century. On the maternal side of the family, the Llosas had arrived in Arequipa a little later, in the seventeenth century, and were in general a better-educated and more artistically oriented family than the physically imposing and adventuresome Vargas grouping. Juan de la Llosa y Llaguno came from Spain directly to Arequipa, where he found a quaint and charming seventeenth-century colonial town, as it was well before the rebellion of Tupac Amaru in 1780. The Ciudad Blanca (White City), as it has been called, was replete with numerous churches, a reputation for producing fine wines and liquors (aguardiente), a vibrant commerce of agricultural products, and a predominantly Spanish Caucasian population with a small minority of mestizos, native American indigenous peoples, and African slaves brought from Spanish outposts in the Caribbean region. In the late eighteenth century, Arequipa had fift y to sixty thousand inhabitants. The architectural charm of the colonial town was noteworthy. The Llosas who followed Juan de la Llosa y Llaguno left a heritage in Arequipa, according to Mario Vargas Llosa himself, “aferrada a ese terruño del sur del Perú al que pobló de abogados, curas, monjas, jueces, profesores, funcionarios, poetas, locos y alguno que otro militar”1 (“Tied to this little land in the south of Peru that he populated with lawyers, priests, nuns, judges, teachers, bureaucrats, poets, crazy people, and a few soldiers”). Vargas Llosa’s reference to locos (or crazy people) is based partially on family lore. Members of his family, for example, tell the story of a

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Llosa who arose one day before lunch, went to the Plaza de Armas (town square) to buy the newspaper, and was not heard of again for twenty-five years, when news of his death came from France.2 Members of the immediate Llosa family have often found ways to be involved in a variety of intellectual and artistic activities. Moreover, from the time of Juan de la Llosa y Llaguno’s arrival in the seventeenth century, Arequipa has been a setting for a thriving cultural life, with the abundant presence of poets, essayists, and orators. During the Colonial period of Spanish rule there were several of these “lettered cities” (ciudades letradas), as the Uruguayan literary and critic Ángel Rama has pointed out, and the cult of the word was the equivalent to the exercising of power. Thus, the Llosas were part of this elite elegance and authority that was deeply entrenched in Hispanic cultural and political tradition. Arequipa is also known in Peru as a hotbed for Romantic poets and orators, and there were several such figures in the Llosa lineage. Mario Vargas Llosa’s great-grandfather don Belisario Llosa de Rivera was a wellknown lawyer and recognized poet of his time. He published a novel and satirical poems that ridiculed some of Arequipa’s most honored and respected social mores. Throughout Latin America, arising from cultural traditions inherited from Spain and perpetuated in the Colonial ciudades letradas, the individuals whom today we call “writers” were the escribanos of the Colonial bureaucracy and court poets, who flourished under the auspices of Colonial power. By the nineteenth century, the escribano/court poet had evolved into the lawyer-poet. To be a writer, one often had to be a lawyer as well in order to make a living. Many of these intellectuals, still active in the twentieth century, became known by professional writers as “weekend writers,” a category of writer that Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and many other intellectuals of their generation disdained and rejected. They boldly launched careers as fulltime professional creative writers, mostly against the advice of their parents, mentors, and society at large. The typical career in Latin America for those interested in letters had been law; both Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez began law studies, and then abandoned their law careers to launch themselves into the fragile and unstable world of professional fiction writing in Latin America. Mario Vargas Llosa’s grandfather, don Pedro Llosa Bustamante, was of the generation of intellectuals in Arequipa who would have considered it professional suicide to make the bold decision taken by the writers of the 1960s Boom and attempt to earn a living exclusively by writ-

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ing. And he was certainly correct. Pedro Llosa Bustamante practiced law, wrote poetry that he occasionally published in the local newspaper, and read voraciously. He was the classic hombre de letras (lettered man, or “Renaissance man,” of the Hispanic tradition) that Vargas Llosa later played out in the more modern, twentieth-century version of the public intellectual. Vargas Llosa’s mother, Dora de Vargas, described Pedro Llosa Bustamante as well educated and well read, or, in her words, “muy ilustrado.”3 The passion for reading that consumed much of the life of Pedro Llosa Bustamante and don Belisario Llosa de Rivero was a dedication to literature; it was also a capacity to consume literature as that orgía perpetua (perpetual orgy) described by their grandson and greatgrandson (Mario Vargas Llosa), respectively, decades later, in his description of reading Flaubert in his book The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary. The Llosa family practiced other traditional artistic endeavors. Mario Vargas Llosa’s grandmother, doña Carmen Ureta de Llosa, was an amateur painter of great skill. She painted detailed landscapes; until her death, Mario Vargas Llosa’s mother, Dora Llosa de Vargas, had three of these landscape paintings in her apartment in Lima, and they were noteworthy remnants of the Llosa line of artists. Dora Llosa de Vargas was not a writer or artist herself, but she was an intellectually lively person who had been an outstanding high school student in the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón, operated by French nuns, in Arequipa. Of the intellectuals and artists of the Llosa lineage, don Belisario Llosa de Rivero was perhaps the most responsible for passing the family’s literary tradition along to Vargas-Llosa-the-child in Cochabamba, Bolivia. As the most senior and respected male in the family and as the most published writer in the family line, don Belisario often praised the young boy, six to eight years old, for his “preliterate” early scribblings. This encouragement, as well as his mother’s praise for his first verses and his creation of his own endings of children’s stories that he had read, were the earliest positive feedback the young Vargas Llosa received as a writer-in-the-making. Mario Vargas Llosa was born early in the morning on March 28, 1936, and by the time this birth took place, Ernesto Vargas had abandoned Dora; when Ernesto was informed of the birth of a son he demanded a divorce, which was legally granted. Within a year of his birth, Mario Vargas Llosa was on the first of many adventures of his lifetime: a move to Cochabamba. Vargas Llosa has no recollection of those first months of his life in Arequipa. For his mother, however, in this staunchly

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conservative Catholic community, the absent husband was the cause of widespread gossip and occasionally cruel speculation about exactly what might have happened to Dorita, to Ernesto, and to their relationship. As the weeks and months passed by with no explanation for Ernesto’s disappearance, Dora Llosa de Vargas suffered both emotional loss and growing social ostracism. The story the young boy heard from the family was that his father had been a pilot and hero who died in an airline accident. Once her father had the opportunity to move the family with the suffering daughter and her new baby to Bolivia to rent a hacienda in order to grow cotton, he signed a ten-year lease. “Prejudiced and afraid of its own shadow” is how Mario Vargas Llosa, years later, described that society of Arequipa.4 When Dora Llosa de Vargas and her baby left her parents’ home on Bulevar Parra of Arequipa—where, on the second floor, that baby had been born—it was a bad period for the Llosa family. These were not the best of times in Peru and Latin America, either. In the year Mario Vargas Llosa was born Peru and the region were still recovering from the worldwide economic depression. The nation was torn by strife and in disarray. Luis Ereyuren won the presidential election in 1936 with the support of the APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, a leftist and populist political party), but this party was declared illegal and the election results nullified. Bolivia, where Vargas Llosa would spend his childhood, was living the aftermath of the Chaco War (1932–1935) and was entering a period of “military socialism.” As workers demanded economic justice in Peru and throughout Latin America, worker movements and unions grew, producing widespread conflict, such as a 1936 strike in Venezuela. In Peru and the Andean region, writers attempted to depict this social injustice and political conflict using the narrative strategies associated with nineteenth-century realism. The leading fiction writers of the Andean region at the time of the birth of Vargas Llosa were José María Arguedas and Ciro Alegría in Peru, Jorge Icaza in Ecuador, and Augusto Céspedes in Bolivia. These novelists had a commitment to social and political change, and in Latin America writers fell into two broad categories. On the one hand, novelists wrote defenses of urban workers. On the other, they wrote indigenista (native American–based) works depicting the exploitation of indigenous Americans and often dealing with the loss of their cultural identity in the face of modernization. Arguedas, Alegría, and Icaza were pioneer indigenista writers; throughout his career as an adult, Vargas Llosa wrote in praise of Arguedas, who was a

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special case in Peru, for he lived both inside and outside of indigenous culture. Many modern scholars and critics have considered Alegría and Icaza, as well as many of their contemporaries in Latin America, to have been too linear, too simplistic in their representation of social inequities, and too black-and-white in their depiction of human beings. Thus, Alegría’s El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941, The world is broad and alien) was at the same time both a supposed masterpiece of indigenista literature and a novelistic embarrassment for Vargas Llosa and many writers of his generation who were interested in a more complex, modernisttype fiction. In retrospect, the most noteworthy novel published the year Vargas Llosa was born was not from the Andean region or any other region of Latin America. It was a novel related to a very specific region of the southern United States, and one that became hugely important for Vargas Llosa when he was an aspiring young writer—Absalom, Absalom! (1936) by William Faulkner. Upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Vargas Llosa placed this Faulkner novel high on the list of most important books for him. Vargas Llosa lived an idyllic childhood in Cochabamba. He experienced economic and emotional security in an ideal educational and cultural setting as a young boy in the family home in Cochabamba. In his book A Fish in Water, he describes nothing but the most positive memories of these childhood years. The political good fortune of the Llosa family, however, led to his grandfather’s appointment to the position of prefect in the northern Peruvian city of Piura. Dora Llosa de Vargas and her son thus moved with the family from Cochabamba to Piura in 1945. The move to this town opened an entirely new world to a young boy who had enjoyed not only an ideal childhood in Bolivia, but also a very protected and pampered life. Compared to other boys his age, he was notably innocent. Exploring different neighborhoods with his new friends, the young Vargas Llosa saw on the outskirts of the town of Piura a mysterious place they called “the green house,” a large house which he eventually came to understand was a bordello. «

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According to the author himself, the year 1945 in Piura was “decisive” for numerous reasons, not all of which are even clear to him.5 “I believe no other period before or after has affected me so deeply as those months in Piura. For what reason? The problem intrigues me, and

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I have tried several times to understand it.”6 His speculation leads him in several directions. Perhaps it was seeing the sea for the first time, as his mother claims. Perhaps it was seeing his native country of Peru for the first time, after living the first eight years in Cochabamba. He also speculates that perhaps the main reason that year in Piura affected him so deeply was that it included the moment, on a day he and some of his friends were attempting to swim in the Piura River, when his young cohorts explained to him the biological basis for human birth. Until that afternoon, the innocent Vargas Llosa still believed that babies came from Paris, delivered by storks. The adult author has described being “offended” by this “emotional earthquake.”7 In reality, this revelation was the major one of a series of deeply disturbing events that subverted life as Vargas Llosa had known it for the first eight years of his idyllic existence in Cochabamba. On that day while the boys were swimming, a formerly poetic understanding of childbirth was replaced with a version that was so pedestrian and crude that Vargas Llosa found it offensive. Piura was also the place the young Mario discovered a neighborhood called La Mangachería. This neighborhood was the home, in the real history of Peru, of a historical figure who is named in the novel The Green House and who is important to understanding the fictional characters within that book. This nearly mythical figure was Colonel Luis M. Sánchez Cerro, who was from Piura and supposedly had been born in La Mangachería. Whether this popular mythology is historically true or not is less important than the fact that many working-class inhabitants of La Mangachería, such as the “Inconquistables” in La casa verde, believed it was. Sánchez Cerro was an important figure in the history of twentieth-century Peru, and he appears in La casa verde. According to Vargas Llosa, there were pictures of Sánchez Cerro in the shacks of all these residents—the mangaches.8 The father of eight children, Sánchez Cerro was born in Piura in 1899 to a modest family; his father was a notary public. Educated in public schools in Piura, he was one of the few presidents of Peru who had not been educated in an elite private high school. At the age of sixteen he entered the Chorrillos Military School, from which he graduated in 1910. A famous conspirator in a military insurrection against President Guillermo Billinghurst, he participated in a failed act of rebellion against President Augusto Bernardo Leguía in 1922. A process of national mythification began on August 22, 1930, when he again raised the banner of a rebellion in Arequipa against the government of Leguía, which had ruled in an autocratic manner during the oncenio (eleven-year rule),

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that is, since 1919. A populist and a right-wing conservative (with certain Fascist and contradictory tendencies in much of his rhetoric), Sánchez Cerro had a major impact on Peruvian politics of the 1930s. This impact was evident beginning at 5:00 p.m. on August 27, 1930, when the trimotor airplane of Mr. “Slim” Fawcett landed at the Miraflores Country Club. The upper crust of Lima’s old aristocracy was waiting for Sánchez Cerro as he arrived in the small airplane. Known as El Negro (as he called himself) or “the Hero of Arequipa” (as his military friends called him), Sánchez Cerro was basically unknown to high society in Lima and Miraflores. The fact that a widely respected citizen of Arequipa, Dr. José Bustamante y Rivero (whom the young Mario had met as a boy in Cochabamba), was one of Sánchez Cerro’s advisors added to the latter’s credibility. As he was transported from Miraflores to Lima, eighty thousand people lined the streets of the capital to applaud him. Sánchez Cerro saw signs that proclaimed him Peru’s Segundo Libertador (second liberator, or second Simón Bolívar). The nation needed an end to Leguía’s dictatorship, and Sánchez Cerro seemed to have arrived at just the right time. It did not take long, however, for Sánchez Cerro, as provisional president, to begin losing his political support. By naming a cabinet consisting of military officers with little political experience, he created doubts among his own generals. In legalizing divorce, Sánchez Cerro also lost the support of the all-powerful Catholic church. His confrontations with the bureaucrats and employees of the Leguía government cost him the support of other followers. Like many military leaders of his generation, Sánchez Cerro saw the workers’ movement as a threat organized by international communism. Thus, once the first strikes broke out at the beginning of his regime, Sánchez Cerro suppressed them even more heavily than had been done during the Leguía presidency. His solution to the politically delicate problem of student unrest was to order the closing of the University of San Marcos (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos). Sánchez Cerro also confronted the leftist APRA, limiting its political activities and prohibiting the return of its main leader, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. The “Hero of Arequipa” was convinced that the APRA was an arm of international communism, and this idea found no opposition among the members of the traditional, Catholic, old oligarchy. Worrisome for the traditional oligarchs, however, was Sánchez Cerro’s announcement of his candidacy for permanent president, to be undertaken while he remained in charge of the military and served as provi-

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sional president. After several rebellions of the army and the navy, Sánchez Cerro resigned in March 1931. Upon leaving for exile in France, he announced that he would return for the next presidential elections. True to his word, he was back in Peru on July 3, 1931, just in time for the presidential elections, running under the banner of the Unión Revolucionaria (to which Vargas Llosa alludes in La casa verde) against Haya de la Torre. The APRA offered a progressive plan that it identified as a programa mínimo (minimal program). The Unión Revolucionaria offered a plan that, on the surface, seemed similar, but in reality contained ideas and candidates that were far less progressive. On October 11, 1931, Sánchez Cerro won the election and assumed the presidency of Peru, despite the street fighting and generalized violence that erupted in reaction to his election. The violence continued, and on March 5, 1932, Sánchez Cerro was shot and wounded in a church in Miraflores. The situation degenerated further when government troops massacred between three and five thousand followers of the APRA in Trujillo. Sánchez Cerro was assassinated on April 30, 1933, by a young APRA follower named Abelardo Mendoza Leiva. On his death, the “Hero of Arequipa” owned only a few clothes, some jewelry of little value, a few military medals, and thirty dollars in cash. Sánchez Cerro remained a local myth for a few years, especially in the neighborhood of Mangachería, where it was claimed that he had been born. The stories about Sánchez Cerro were still being told in Piura when Vargas Llosa was a young boy living in the town; the working-class characters of La Mangachería in La casa verde adore Sánchez Cerro; this caudillo is also mentioned in Historia de Mayta (1984, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta). La Mangachería was a working-class neighborhood with widespread unemployment because of the crisis among the large landowners (latifundistas) in the region: the landowners could no longer provide housing for the peasants, and as a result slums grew up on the outskirts of Piura.9 With the modernizing of farming technology in the 1920s, these new working-class neighborhoods included La Mangachería and another neighborhood described in La casa verde, La Gallinacera. The majority of the uprooted peasants ended up unemployed or sporadically employed.10 For the young Vargas Llosa, La Mangachería was the most “original” neighborhood of Piura, with savory food and authentic dishes.11 In 1945 the young Mario began discovering the true empirical reality of Peru, getting to know it beyond the stories of Incas that he had read in the Billiken series of children’s comic books that were circu-

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lating in South America in the 1940s. His amazing discoveries about life in general and Peruvian life specifically were not difficult for the young Vargas Llosa to accept, with the possible exception of that new lesson concerning the birth of children. At the end of the year 1945, the acquisition of an ugly image in place of a formerly poetic vision of human sexuality was followed by a related but more dramatic trauma in his life. His mother took him to a hotel lobby in Piura for an unannounced meeting with someone whom Vargas Llosa had been led to believe was dead: his father, Ernesto Vargas. The background to the surprise meeting between the father and son was that the parents had secretly met and reconciled after Ernesto’s nine-year absence. The father that the young Vargas Llosa met, unfortunately, had nothing in common with the quasi-mythic paternal figure the young Mario had imagined for the first eight years of his life in Cochabamba. He was not the heroic pilot that the entire family had portrayed him to be. Moreover, the personal chemistry was bad between the two from the first words they exchanged in the hotel lobby, and worsened from there. From the hotel, the three of them went for a drive in Ernesto’s car, and ended up in a nearby town, spending the night in a hotel on their way to Lima. While they were on the highway, Ernesto explained the shocking news: the couple had been separated for many years, but now they were back together. «

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The newly constituted family—father, mother, and son—moved into the Magdalena middle- and working-class neighborhood of Lima for the first year, and then transferred over to the more comfortable and elegant upper-middle-class district of Miraflores. Originally a summer retreat for the wealthy as an outlying town of Lima in the 1930s, it began its transformation into a residential neighborhood in the 1940s. In the 1950s, when Ernesto Vargas, Dora Llosa de Vargas, and Mario Vargas Llosa moved there, it was at its peak as one of the most elegant residential neighborhoods of the greater Lima area. The three of them lived on the Calle Porta, between Benavides Avenue and Juan Fanning Street. The young Vargas Llosa was now ten minutes from the commercial (and social) center of Miraflores and ten minutes from the Parque Salazar at the beach, his other social center. Nearby was the Calle Diego Ferré, with some of the most ample and luxurious homes of Miraflores. Despite this ideal physical setting, the family situation was a disaster. Vargas Llosa

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himself has called it the most abnormal home in the world.12 He also describes it as the most bitter period of his life; he lived constantly in fear. Vargas Llosa began his high school studies in the Colegio LaSalle, completing the first two years from 1947 to 1949. The young boy who had been the little king of the home in Cochabamba now lived with a rigid disciplinarian for a father, one who would not tolerate the childish games of a spoiled child. Ernesto’s discipline involved physical abuse; he sometimes hit his son. Years later, Vargas Llosa wrote of being terrified by his father. The worst moment of the father-son relationship came when Ernesto discovered that Mario was writing poems, an activity that the traditional and conservative Ernesto considered effeminate and related to homosexuality. Consequently, he decided to enroll Mario in the Leoncio Prado military school. (When Vargas Llosa finally published his first poems many years later, as an adult in his seventies, it was perhaps the ultimate rejection of the father, a statement almost as strong as his antiauthoritarian and anti-dictator novels). The military school was another world. The adolescent Mario’s experience here was comparable to the terror of living at home. The human cruelty of the Leoncio Prado was fictionalized in Vargas Llosa’s first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1963, The Time of the Hero). Vargas Llosa has stated that there he discovered violence. Besides the violence, Vargas Llosa discovered Peru. In the Leoncio Prado he found the complete spectrum of a heterogeneous Peruvian society, comprising all social classes and ethnic groups. Consequently, the fourteen-year-old adolescent and future novelist experienced life amid a microcosm of Peru’s complex society that, before entering this school, he had hardly known at all. This was the first of several opportunities—in the end, fortunate ones—that Vargas Llosa had in his life to see all levels of Peruvian society.13 Oviedo describes this period in the Leoncio Prado as a time when the young boy was poorly adapted: a period of poor grades and disciplinary punishments in which a young rebel was in the process of being formed.14 This trauma was so deep that Vargas Llosa has opposed all figures of abusive authority—particularly dictatorial regimes against which he has written in novels and essays—for his entire life and to the depths of his very “being.”15 Vargas Llosa has described his experience as “a kind of trauma.”16 In an amusing way, Vargas Llosa also became something of a professional writer in the Leoncio Prado. The other students came to him to write love letters on their behalf, which he did in exchange for cigarettes; for his friends, he provided the service for free. While in this military school, Vargas Llosa read voraciously; this

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Mario Vargas Llosa

was when he first read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Books such as this French classic provided an escape from the brutal reality that surrounded him, and this French novel gained a permanent place among the books that the adult Vargas Llosa considers one of the truly great novels. Years later, military school was background for the writing of his book on Hugo’s Les Misérables, La tentación de lo imposible (2004, The Impossible Temptation), and laid the groundwork for his vision of the writer as the producer of lengthy and ambitious “total” novels, as Fuentes would later call them in his 1969 essay, La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Les Misérables was Vargas Llosa’s early experience with such vast, totalizing literary projects. The violence that the young Mario discovered in the Leoncio Prado was, in effect, part of a generalized and broad-based violence about which the adolescent Vargas Llosa had been unaware during his protected life in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Piura, Peru. The 1930s had opened with the violence of Sánchez Cerro’s government, a regime responsible for a massacre in Trujillo and ended by the death of a Peruvian president. The governments of General Oscar  R. Benavides (1933–1939) and Manuel Prado y Ugarteche (1939–1945) were unsuccessful at finding peace with the plethora of groups in conflict. In March 1945, Dr. José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, Peruvian ambassador in Bolivia (and friend of the Llosa family) accepted the nomination of the FDN (Frente Democrático Nacional) for the presidency of Peru. Bustamante y Rivero sought and attained reconciliation with the APRA. On June 10, 1945, Peru held its cleanest election in decades, and the winner by a vast majority was Dr. Bustamante y Rivero. This lawyer from Arequipa sought a democratic and decentralized government, in contrast with the previous domination of the old oligarchy and the military.17 Bustamante had excellent credentials for this leadership role, including having denounced his position in Sánchez Cerro’s cabinet, once he recognized his dictatorial tendencies. But President Bustamante y Rivero was not able to maintain good relations with the APRA, and political violence was increased during his government, including the assassination of the respected political figure Francisco Graña Garland on January 7, 1947, which caused a national crisis. Bustamante y Rivero also had to face an increasingly serious economic crisis. On October 29, 1948, when Vargas Llosa was a student in the Colegio LaSalle in Lima, President Bustamante y Rivero was deposed from the presidency and taken into exile to Argentina. General Manuel A. Odría, the man who had orchestrated the coup, assumed power. With Odría, the already violent na-

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tion entered an even darker stage—comparable in many ways to Vargas Llosa’s experience in the violent microcosm of the Leoncio Prado military school. From the perspective of Vargas Llosa, the experience of the Leoncio Prado was painful and traumatic. The two years in the Leoncio Prado were difficult and he had some terrible days, including some in which the punishment was not being able to leave school for the weekend.18 After two years, the young Mario convinced his parents to let him return to Piura, where he finished high school in the Colegio Nacional San Miguel. That was where he began his literary career more publicly. At this stage the writer-in-the-making was an enthusiastic reader of Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. In the summer of 1952, before going to Piura, he wrote brief journalistic pieces for the newspaper La Crónica in Lima. He did creative writing in several genres in Piura, including a play, La huida del Inca (The flight of the Inca), which he directed for a performance on July 17, 1952, in the Teatro Variedades of Piura. Years later, after establishing himself as a novelist, he returned to the creation of theater.19 At a distance from the threat of his father, he published his first poems. He also wrote short pieces for several newspapers, including La Industria in Piura. The other literary importance of the experience in Piura, besides these early writings and the setting for La casa verde, is that it provided the anecdotal material for parts of his first volume of stories, Los jefes (1959). The year in Piura afforded the young Mario the opportunity to launch his nascent literary career, as well as freeing him from his two major burdens—his father and the Leoncio Prado military school. At the time he returned to Lima in 1953 to begin his studies of letras (literature) at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, the situation in Peru was not good: the entire nation was suffering under the oppressive dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría, which lasted until 1956. Odría was born in the rural area of the mountains (the sierra), in the small town of Tarma, in 1897 and had studied in the military school of Chorrillos, where he had graduated as the top student in 1919. After completing military training in the United States, Odría was named minister of government by President Bustamante y Rivero. Upon assuming control of the provisional government on October 30, 1948, Odría established an essentially authoritarian regime, proclaiming an estado de sitio (state of emergency) and suspending all the rights and guarantees of the Peruvian constitution. A security law declared in June 1949 allowed numerous abuses of human rights and se-

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Mario Vargas Llosa

verely limited freedom of expression and the press. (The fact that Vargas Llosa was working as a part-time journalist during this period might well explain, in part, his lifelong, consistent support of freedom of expression.) Upon being elected “constitutional” president in 1950, Odría launched a comprehensive campaign against the APRA: against labor unions, universities, and armed forces under APRA control. During the first eight months of his government, he incarcerated some four thousand members of the APRA. The APRA leader, Haya de la Torre, went into exile in the Colombian embassy in Lima. The persecution of APRA members, in fact, was one of the main activities of Odría’s government. During the first two years he was in power, Odría directed a military government that held all executive and legislative power. Once securely at the helm, he announced elections for July of 1950, but without the participation of the APRA or the communists. (Vargas Llosa’s father, Ernesto Vargas, supported Odría, which was probably one reason that, as a student, Vargas Llosa aligned himself with the communists, and belonged to a secret cell of communists.) A few weeks before the election, Odría declared the candidacy of his opposition, Ernesto Montagne, invalid for technical reasons. This declaration caused a rebellion in Arequipa; Odría’s troops killed two hundred there. (A fictionalized version of this uprising appears in Conversación en La Catedral.) The government accused the APRA and the communists of causing this uprising and imprisoned the leader of the rebels. The presidential elections, then, were a “yes” or “no” vote for Odría, and the government reported an 80 percent vote in favor of the dictator. Odría’s economic plan, in accordance with the recommendation of the U.S. consulting firm Klein-Saks, was for a “free economy.” Odría secured loans from the World Bank and the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, at the same time that he opened the doors to foreign investors. U.S. investment in Peru doubled between 1950 and 1955, reaching $300 million.20 Peru gained recognition in the worldwide capitalist markets for its “respect” for private property and its favorable disposition toward allowing foreign companies to do mining. The government undertook a plan to construct highways and hydroelectric plants. It also launched a plan for the construction of schools. Despite all the propaganda around those plans, Odría’s military budget was always more robust than the money invested in social programs and the infrastructure. Rumors circulated about corruption at the highest levels of the government, and Odría spent progressively less time governing the nation and increasingly more time in nightclubs. The

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1956 elections were won by Manuel Prado, candidate for the Movimiento Democrático Pradista (the Pradista Democratic Movement), putting an end to the ochenio and one of darkest chapters of Peru’s political history. «

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In his different jobs the young Vargas Llosa was able to see the dictatorship up close and from a variety of angles. He began his studies of literature and law at San Marcos University at the same time that he held several jobs: assistant to the distinguished historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea; librarian at the Club Nacional; director of information at the Panamerican radio station (an experience that appeared later in the novel La tía Julia y el escribidor [1977, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter]); and collaborator in several magazines. With his studies and all these jobs, Vargas Llosa was working day and night. At least one of these jobs was eminently literary—and the Peruvian author found it to be the most pleasant: working as an assistant in a library in an elegant private club in Lima, browsing through bookshelves and reading books.21 In addition, during this period, for the second time in his life, since his days in the Leoncio Prado, Vargas Llosa lived intensely amid the entire gamut of Peruvian society. While he was living the multiple realities of Peru, from such wide-ranging perspectives as that offered by the newspaper, the one presented at the university, and the one on the radio, he also began reading Faulkner, the master of multiple perspectives in narrative fiction. Understandably enough, the young Vargas Llosa found Faulkner’s fiction of great interest. For young college students in the 1950s in Peru, attaining social awareness and political consciousness for the first time, certain key readings were, de facto, so common that they were obligatory: Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Manuel González Prada, and José Carlos Mariátegui. At the University of San Marcos, it was not necessary to have actually read these authors to be aware of them—their names and ideas were widely circulated across campus and in the cafés. When he was a student at this university, Vargas Llosa belonged to a communist cell that read and discussed Marx, whose ideas on historical materialism and the class struggle had circulated in Peru since the nineteenth century. In this period, Marx was known by Peruvian intellectuals such as Manuel González Prada (1848–1918), but it was not until the twentieth century that he had any noticeable impact. Young Peruvian intellectuals of the 1950s read Sartre with enthusiasm, and with great interest in his concept

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Mario Vargas Llosa

of the politically committed—engagé—intellectual; this “commitment” became a trademark idea for Latin American writers of the 1960s and 1970s who were intellectually formed in the 1950s, with Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes among the most prominent. It is possible to trace a continuous line of political thought that begins with González Prada and then follows with the Peruvian intellectuals José de la Riva Agüero and Francisco García Calderón to Mariátegui and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. The latter were influenced by a first generation, including, in the nineteenth century, González Prada, who was an aristocratic criollo who rebelled against the dominant Hispanist tradition and promoted an eclectic nationalism, thus turning against most of the basic principles of his own social class in Peru. He had read the European social critics of his time, including Marx, and he organized a literary circle that published La Revista Social between 1885 and 1888. Influenced by European positivists, González Prada attacked the Catholic Church. His ideology was a synthesis of different nationalist and indigenista ideas of this generation of writers, such as Clorinda Matto de Turner, who clamored for an authentic national literature instead of creations imitating European models. Even though he himself was not a Marxist or socialist, González Prada served as a model for later generations, as did Mariátegui. In some articles published in the magazine Cultura Peruana in 1958, Vargas Llosa exhibited a knowledge of the work of González Prada, who, along with his contemporaries, exercised a great influence on a generation of intellectuals known in Peru as the Generation of 1900. They were readers of European intellectuals such as Maurice Barrés, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, and Herbert Spencer. As students at the University of San Marcos, this generation fought for university reforms. Riva Agüero became a fervent nationalist, but after Leguía’s coup d’état in 1919, he fled to Europe, where he became a fascist. García Calderón, as a typical member of the generation, was an anti-colonialist, a positivist, and a nationalist. Vargas Llosa published essays on García Calderón in 1956 and on Riva Agüero in 1959: they were noteworthy predecessors to Vargas Llosa’s early political thinking. A major figure for Peruvian students and intellectuals in the 1950s, Mariátegui was an essayist and political activist of the 1920s who died in 1930, at the age of forty. After his initiation into Peruvian politics and journalism in the second decade of the twentieth century, in 1919 Mariátegui went to Paris, where he was involved with political actors, primarily communists and socialists. Even though he had already read

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some Marx in Peru, more readings in Paris were a revelation for Mariátegui. His subsequent political activism in Peru emerged along with the political work of Haya de la Torre, who founded the APRA in 1924. Despite their often parallel political work, these two major figures of the 1920s distanced themselves from each other in 1928. In the 1920s, Peru’s first generation of leftists were not only assiduous readers of González Prada, Mariátegui, and Haya de la Torre, but also of Leo Tolstoy, Hugo, Henri Barbusse, and Émile Zola. Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven essays for the interpretation of Peruvian reality) have been a canonical set of essays not only for generations in Peru, but in all of Latin America since their publication in 1928. Even though all of Vargas Llosa’s intellectual forefathers, from González Prada onward, had done their respective analyses of Peru’s national reality, Mariátegui opened his volume of seven essays with what was at the time a new kind of analysis: one based on economic principles. (Ironically, this was Vargas Llosa’s interest in the 1980s: to offer a new kind of analysis using what, at the time, was the new economics.) Based on Marxist principles, however, Mariátegui’s “Esquema de la evolución económica” (Scheme of economic evolution) is a critical analysis of the entire history of Peru, from the supposedly “socialist” society of the Incas to the insertion of British and American interests in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essays in Mariátegui’s volume are based on concrete economic analysis, a noteworthy undertaking in a period when most considerations of nationhood or national identity had to do more with the “spiritual” or “moral” character of Peruvians, or were attempts to describe the “soul” of the nation. As far as the issue of indigenous peoples, for example, Mariátegui affirmed that the matter of the indigenous people starts with economics. In résumé, Mariátegui was the first important materialist in Peru, and Vargas Llosa, as a college student in 1956, published a series of articles on this Peruvian thinker and essayist. Even though it might not seem promising today to search for similarities between a classic left ist such as Mariátegui and a classic liberal such as Vargas Llosa, it is interesting to note their commonalities: in both cases, an absent father, a precocious childhood involving writing at a very young age, and a period in journalism followed by another becoming radicalized during a stay in Paris. At the age of thirty, both Mariátegui and Vargas Llosa were radical leftists residing in Paris. At the age of nineteen, Vargas Llosa rebelled against his family; this first rebellion was more of a personal, adolescent rebellion than a po-

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« 18 » Mario Vargas Llosa

litical one. He fell in love with an aunt, Julia Urquidi Illanes, and scandalized his family by marrying her. A distant relative from the Bolivian branch of the Llosa family, Julia was thirty-one years old when the couple decided to elope to a small town south of Lima to get officially married, a scandal to the middle-class conservative Catholic values of his family and most middle-class Peruvians at the time. As was novelized years later in La tía Julia y el escribidor, the adventure of Vargas Llosa’s first marriage was a melodrama for the entire Vargas Llosa family. The newlyweds moved into a small, two-room apartment in Miraflores, and in order for Vargas Llosa to support his new wife, he held seven jobs. One of these required the macabre work of marking graves at a cemetery— the Cementerio General de Lima. Despite his economic difficulties, Vargas Llosa did manage to carry out his first act of rebellion. Soon thereafter, his rebellion dealt directly with his experience in Piura and Lima during the years 1945 to 1955, in the form of his first novel. «

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Vargas Llosa’s adolescence afforded him the opportunity for a deep and intense contact with the empirical reality of Peru. The years that followed, from 1956 to 1974, were focused on relentless reading and writing. His adventuresome spirit—in the Vargas tradition—took him to Europe, where he successfully began living the life he had always desired: that of a total commitment to literature. The precocious child became the precocious young writer; the traumatized young boy became the writer who used literature to deal with his traumas.22 In this period from 1956 to 1974 he published his first short stories and his first four novels. The apprentice writer became the celebrity writer of the Hispanic world. He wrote his first stories in Lima between 1953 and 1957, but he lived most of this highly productive period in Europe (from 1958 to 1974) with brief visits to Peru. He read and wrote constantly, while establishing his personal relationships with the writers of the 1960s Boom, headed by Carlos Fuentes (as the intellectual and political leader) and himself (as the precocious novelist). During the years 1956 and 1957 Vargas Llosa continued his frantic activity, writing for newspapers and magazines at the same time that he edited the political organ Democracia, which offered critique of Odría’s dictatorship. He also worked with Luis Loayza and Abelardo Oquendo on the editing of Cuadernos de Composición (1956–1957, Composition notebooks). His sense of self-discipline and responsibility with respect

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to his literary work was impressive: throughout this period he was publishing his early writings. In late 1956, Vargas Llosa published his first story, “El abuelo” (The grandfather), in the newspaper El Comercio (December 9, 1956). It is a story that grew out of his experience in Peru, but was also inspired by two of Paul Bowles’s books that Vargas Llosa has described as “beautiful” (bellos) and “perverse”: A Delicate Prey and The Sheltering Sky.23 Two months later, in February of 1957, he published his second story, “Los jefes” (The chiefs) in a separate issue of the magazine El Mercurio Peruano of Lima. It is a story of adolescence, related to an experience in high school in Piura: some boys confront the authorities in the school, creating a moral dilemma among those in leadership roles. The short story re-creates a strike that Vargas Llosa and some of his classmates attempted to organize in school, at the Colegio San Miguel de Piura. Vargas Llosa culminated his first year of short fiction publication by winning a literary prize organized by the Revue Francaise in Paris with the story “El desafío” (The challenge), a story quite distinct from his other early fiction, dealing with a magical, ritualistic fight between two men. The prize from the Revue Francaise afforded Vargas Llosa the opportunity, at the age of twenty-one, to enjoy two weeks in Paris, with a room in the Hotel Napoleon, from which the young Peruvian could see the Eiffel Tower. Twenty years later, Vargas Llosa recalled this trip as an unforgettable experience full of entertaining episodes.24 He did not succeed in seeing his idol of that period of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre, but he did meet Camus, whom he approached unabashedly as the iconic French writer was exiting from a theatrical representation of his play Les Justes. Mario gave Camus a copy of a literary magazine that he was editing with some young collaborators in Peru, and Camus surprised him with his good Spanish. With Vargas Llosa’s next trip to Europe in 1958, he began a de facto sixteen-year self-exile, with only brief trips to Peru. After this first stay in Paris, on the return flight, he stopped over in the Peruvian Amazonian jungle, where he spent two weeks traveling with the Mexican anthropologist Juan Comas. This experience in the Amazon was the first step in getting background information and ideas for the early novel La casa verde (1966, The Green House), and eventually useful for the later novels El hablador (1987, The Storyteller), a project of the 1980s, and El sueño del celta (2010, The Dream of the Celt) a project of the twenty-first century. For Vargas Llosa, the Amazonian experience was as eye-opening as it had been to discover the world of the Leoncio Prado military school;

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he now relearned—on a much larger scale—that the world was not the small and relatively passive place in which he had been living until then. When he went to the Alto Marañón River in the Amazon jungle in Peru, he realized that his nation was something more vast and intimidating than it had ever seemed from the Leoncio Prado.25 The specific historical and cultural background from this Amazonian trip that appears later in La casa verde, El hablador, and El sueño del celta involves the rubber industry in Peru both in the late nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. From the 1880s onward there had been a worldwide boom in the rubber industry because of the fashionable new mode of transportation that was the bicycle, followed by the automobile industry. Between 1880 and 1920, the Amazon region exported 80 million dollars’ worth of rubber, and the region was second in the world in rubber production from 1902 to 1906. During this rubber boom, the Amazonian city of Iquitos prospered in ways comparable to the banana boom in the Caribbean region of Colombia in the early twentieth century, or to the Gold Rush in California in the nineteenth century. This jungle town of Iquitos hosted twenty-five thousand inhabitants, consuls of ten nations, and a luxury hotel (the Malecón Palace) that was constructed with material imported from Paris. Just a few companies controlled most of the rubber industry; they had obtained concessions from the government to exploit trees of the genus Hevea that were tended by indigenous peoples and mestizos. In addition to the typical exploitation of rural workers well known in Latin America, there was extreme abuse in some cases that would be most appropriately described as slavery. Vargas Llosa got a brief glimpse of the history of this slavery while in the jungle in 1958; this glimpse and the reading of Conrad decades later led him on the path to investigating the operations of the rubber magnate Julio C. Arana in Peru and the eventual writing of El sueño del celta. Beginning in 1915, the rubber industry declined in Peru as precipitously as it had arisen. The demise was caused primarily by Asian competition—there had been a rebirth of the rubber industry in Indonesia— but Arana’s empire also came under the constant questioning of British authorities after the British envoy Roger Casement submitted a report on the abuses in Peru. Thus, prosperity in Iquitos vanished as quickly as had the “leafstorm” in the banana region of Colombia. Both these periods of the rubber industry in Peru appear in La casa verde; the reader of this novel also sees the period immediately after the second boom, when rubber was no longer a profitable enterprise.

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The region that Vargas Llosa visited in 1958 was in the department of Loreto, which has Iquitos as its capital. The Amazon River dominates the region and, as the young Peruvian discovered, is vast in proportions. A traveler claimed in 1914 that the area is so vast that different species of animals inhabit the two riverbanks.26 Until well into the twentieth century the indigenous groups of this region were little known and often mistreated. An early-twentieth-century traveler, demonstrating the racism that is typical of the period, characterized them as insects: “A tribe depends on just one type of tree, just as insects depend on one type of fruit or leaf to survive.”27 The indigenous groups that Vargas Llosa found inhabiting the region in 1958 included the Aguarunas, the Huambisas, the Achuar, and the Shuar, which belong to the ethnic group that the Spaniards had identified as la gran nación jíbara (“the great jíbaro nation”). In his novels Vargas Llosa mentions specifically the Aguarunas, the Huambisas, and the Shakras. There are approximately twenty-five thousand indigenous people in the part of the Amazon basin that Vargas Llosa initially visited, the region of the Alto Marañón River as well as its tributaries, the Nieva River, the Santiago River, and the Cenepa River. The Huambisas live to the north of the region that Vargas Llosa saw in 1958, near Ecuador, along the Santiago River; this is one area of Arana’s rubber operation about which Vargas Llosa wrote much later in El sueño del celta. The Aguaranas, like most of their counterparts in the Peruvian Amazon basin, live in semi-permanent villages, typically with about 150 inhabitants. They are known to be good fighters, and practice the shrinking of the skulls of their enemies. Upon his return from Paris and the Amazon jungle, Vargas Llosa published a report, under the title “Crónica de un viaje a la selva” (Chronicle of a trip to the jungle) in the magazine Cultura Peruana. His more important writing based on his experience in the jungle appeared in print eight years later, with the publication of La casa verde. In 1958, Vargas Llosa directed another literary magazine with his friends Luis Loayza and Abelardo Oquendo under the title Literatura, a project that lasted one year. The first issue of the magazine (February 1958) featured poems by the Peruvian poet César Moro, a note on Moro by Vargas Llosa, and brief articles by André Coyné, Carlos Germán Belli, Javier Sologuren, and José Durán. At the end of this first issue is a note by the Peruvian fiction writer Sebastián Salazar Bondy that is titled “Mao

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Tse Tung between Poetry and Revolution,” an obvious indicator that this was a progressive, leftist-leaning group of young intellectuals. Vargas Llosa completed his undergraduate studies in 1958 at the University of San Marcos with a degree in humanities and a thesis titled “Bases para una interpretación de Rubén Darío” (Foundations for an interpretation of Rubén Darío). His mentor in Peru, Raúl Porras Barrenechea, professor of history and senator who had supported him during his difficult economic years in the 1950s, helped him obtain a scholarship in Spain for graduate study in literature at the Complutense University of Madrid (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). When the twenty-twoyear-old left Lima for Madrid, it was with the intention of dedicating himself to reading and writing, creative activities that in the end were frequently related to his traumas and “demons” from his life experience in the 1940s and 1950s. «

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In Madrid, Mario and his wife, Julia, lived on the Calle del Doctor Castelo, near the Parque del Retiro, while Vargas Llosa pursued his doctoral studies in literature (the Facultad de Letras) at the Complutense University. During his year in Madrid (1958–1959), he was awarded the Leopoldo Alas Prize, a Spanish literary award, for his volume of short stories Los jefes. Having been in Paris on his first trip to Europe, he hardly found Franco’s Madrid an attractive city. Rather, the young Vargas Llosa found it to be provincial, with heavy censorship and other limits. His typical routine in Madrid was to attend classes or study at the Biblioteca Nacional in the morning and to do his creative work—including writing the initial pages of his first novel—in the afternoon. The young writer had arrived in Madrid with the specific idea in mind to somehow write a novel about his experience in the Leoncio Prado military school in Lima. His first small working notebook, in which he wrote in July and August of 1958, contained just five pages on Rubén Darío (his real and immediate work as a graduate student) but some eighty-five pages of his first draft of La ciudad y los perros (1963, The Time of the Hero). As it happens, all of Vargas Llosa’s books have been written this way, with handwritten first drafts in notebooks (see the epilogue for further discussion of Vargas Llosa and his notebooks). In Madrid he spent many afternoons in a tasca called El Jute, and in this bar he did his writing by hand. Afterward, he would go home and use his typewriter to transcribe his manuscript. It was in Spain that this grad-

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uate student of twenty-three years of age made the first of several decisions on the direction of his life: “voy a tratar de ser escritor” (“I am going to try to be a writer”).28 Having made that resolution, he worked on those initial pages of La ciudad y los perros in Madrid and then took his partial first draft with him to Paris in 1960. When his scholarship ended after a year in Madrid, Mario and Julia left for Paris, the young graduate student convinced that he also had a scholarship to study in France. Of course, to live in Paris had been a childhood dream since his first readings of Dumas and Hugo. Desiring to study in Paris, he had written to the minister of foreign affairs in Peru requesting support for a scholarship. The minister assured him that a scholarship would be forthcoming and encouraged him to go to Paris. Once Vargas Llosa had settled in and finally saw the official list of grantees, however, his name was not on it. His plan—to study in Paris for a year and then return to Lima—changed: now he had to work to survive in Paris. Despite the economic difficulties that he suffered during the first few months there, he had unforgettable literary experiences, too: he purchased his first copy of Madame Bovary in French, fell in love with the novel, and years later wrote a book about the love affair under the title La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary (1975, The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary). This was also the period in which he read the other French and European novelists that became the most important writers of his life, after Flaubert and Faulkner: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Hugo. Between 1960 and 1964 the young Peruvian couple lived in several neighborhoods in Paris. At the beginning, they were in a small room in the Hotel Wetter, near the Cluny Museum, where they lived uncomfortably. Vargas Llosa was able to continue his work there: he reread Sartre, Flaubert, and Faulkner, and returned to that eighty-five-page manuscript that he had handwritten in Madrid for the novel that would eventually be titled La ciudad y los perros (Vargas Llosa had another preferred title, Los impostores, until the book was published). He spent his time in Paris writing his novels, publishing political and literary essays, and holding various jobs. He taught Spanish in the Berlitz School, worked for France Press and, later, for French radio-television. La ciudad y los perros was mostly written in Paris in 1960 and 1961. The novel deals with his traumatic experience in the Leoncio Prado military school, but also reflects the author’s ongoing readings of Sartre and Faulkner. In this period, Vargas Llosa’s friend Luis Loayza called the author “el Sartrecillo valiente,” or “the valiant little Sartre.”29 The early

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1960s were stimulating and active years for Vargas Llosa in many important aspects of his life: what he was reading, what he was writing, and whom he was meeting. He read French literature obsessively: he tells of buying the thirteen tomes of Flaubert’s Correspondences in 1962. The essays that Vargas Llosa published in the early 1960s were on Camus (1962), Cuba (1962), Javier Heraud (1963), Sartre (1964), Hugo (1964), Hemingway (1964), Simone de Beauvoir (1964), and Luis Loayza (1964). (Later, in his 1984 novel, Historia de Mayta, he refers to the Peruvian poet and revolutionary Javier Heraud.) He published two essays on his trip to Cuba in October 1962, where he had been sent by the French press to cover the missile crisis in Cuba. The two reports that Vargas Llosa wrote from Cuba were very favorable toward the Cuban Revolution. From these reports, it is evident that he was fascinated with the cultural heterogeneity of the island and the support the Cuban people gave their leader, Fidel Castro. Vargas Llosa also observed with great interest the new discipline of the Cuban people and their commitment to the Cuban Revolution. In addition to these reports from Cuba, Vargas Llosa’s brief reflections on Sartre, Camus, and Javier Heraud are noteworthy in retrospect for their political content, for these are the writings of a fervent young leftist revolutionary in 1962. Despite being a great admirer of Sartre, Vargas Llosa chose to disagree with Sartre’s claim that it is more important for a Third World intellectual to teach an illiterate to read than to write a novel. Upon reading this statement by Sartre, in fact, Vargas Llosa was offended. And despite having been an avid reader of Camus since the early 1950s, Vargas Llosa described him in his 1962 essay as a fine novelist who, in the end, was an inferior thinker and philosopher. Vargas Llosa’s article on the Peruvian poet and guerrilla leader Javier Heraud offered warm support of Heraud’s efforts, and Vargas Llosa used the case of Heraud to make the claim that Peru had reached the limits of its status quo and needed radical change. During his early years in France, Vargas Llosa met numerous Latin American writers. In the early 1960s, he got together with Julio Cortázar; this was before the Argentine writer’s revolutionary period, which began in the mid-1960s. In fact, Cortázar was one of the first Latin American writers Vargas Llosa met in Paris; their first encounter was in December 1958 in the home of a mutual friend, Alfonso de Silva. They became increasingly good friends over the years, and Cortázar offered an early reading and commentary of the manuscript of La ciudad y los perros. Cortázar was helpful to Vargas Llosa in those early years, and although

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the Argentine writer had the reputation of being reserved and distant from most intellectuals, he and Vargas Llosa became intimate friends over the years. By the 1970s, Cortázar had become a political writer and committed leftist, and Vargas Llosa, the fervent revolutionary of the early 1960s, was increasingly critical of the leftist intellectuals, particularly the Cuban regime, on matters of human rights and censorship. Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa and Cortázar remained intimate friends until the latter’s untimely death in 1984. As a broadcaster on French radio-television, Vargas Llosa interviewed not only Cortázar but several other Latin American writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, and Miguel Ángel Asturias. With respect to Borges, Vargas Llosa has always spoken in the highest of terms of all his encounters with Borges the writer and Borges the person, including the first interview in the early 1960s. Before that interview, Vargas Llosa had heard the Argentine master deliver a lecture on fantastic literature; the lecture had left him stunned.30 With respect to that other luminary of the Boom, Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa had met the brash and rebellious young Mexican writer in Mexico in the early 1960s. They met at a party in Mexico City in 1962. Fuentes wrote in 1963, after the publication of La ciudad y los perros, that the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, the Argentine Cortázar, and the Peruvian Vargas Llosa were the major contemporary novelists of Latin America.31 After completing La ciudad y los perros, Vargas Llosa had difficulties in publishing this first novel. His friend Sebastián Salazar Bondy sent the manuscript to an Argentine publisher that promptly rejected it. The Spanish editor Carlos Barral suggested to the young Peruvian that he send it to a novel prize competition in Spain, the Premio Biblioteca Breve. Despite his initial reluctance to follow this suggestion, Vargas Llosa decided to give it a try. Soon thereafter, a committee consisting of José María Castellet, José María Valverde, Víctor Seix Barral, Carlos Barral, and Juan Petit awarded Mario Vargas Llosa the prize. After this, the work of Mario Vargas Llosa would never again be unknown. Once the novel appeared in print in Spanish in October of 1963, it was an immediate success. In Spain, it was awarded another prize, the Premio de la Crítica Española (Spanish critics’ prize); in France, it received second place in the Prix Formentor competition. In Peru, however, rather than receiving awards, La ciudad y los perros produced scandals. At the Leoncio Prado military school, for example, a thousand copies of the novel were burned in a public ceremony. Indeed, the novel did not portray this Peruvian military institution

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in a positive light. On the one hand, the use of vulgar language and the presence of nontraditional sexual practices offended all those who protected traditional Catholic, military, and middle-class values in Peru. For the old oligarchy in Peru, traditionally allied with the military, La ciudad y los perros was an offensive questioning of military authority and ethics. For Vargas Llosa and many of his readers, however, La ciudad y los perros presented a reasonably accurate microcosm of Peruvian society. The military school did, in fact, recruit and offer scholarships to young boys from all sectors of Peruvian society. As we have seen, for the adolescent Vargas Llosa, whose experience of Peru had been limited to Piura and the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Miraflores in Lima, this insight into the ethnic, cultural, and social milieu of Peru had been a revelation. La ciudad y los perros is Vargas Llosa’s first but not most ambitious Faulknerian project. Like Faulkner, Vargas Llosa constructs a multilayered novel using a series of fragments with varying time lines, consisting of eighty-one narrative segments that appear in two parts and an epilogue. Each of the two parts contains eight chapters, and these chapters generally consist of four or five narrative segments. One chapter has only one narrative segment, two chapters have ten narrative segments, and the epilogue and three other chapters contain three narrative segments. This complex structure also features a variety of narrators within and outside the story. Approximately one-third of the novel consists of first-person narrations—thirty-six of eighty-one segments. The event that sets the novel in motion is the theft of a chemistry examination by Cava, a student in the Leoncio Prado military school. Unable to identify the culprit in the robbery, the school authorities confine all the cadets to their barracks indefinitely. After enduring confinement for several weeks, and consequently unable to visit his girlfriend on the weekend, one of the cadets, nicknamed Slave (Ricardo Arana), reveals the thief’s identity to the school officials in exchange for the right to leave the premises. The school subsequently expels Cava. Jaguar, the aggressive leader of the youths in the school, along with his peers, suspects that someone has betrayed them. Soon thereafter, Slave is shot during some practice military maneuvers. Even though Jaguar appears to be guilty of the crime, the school officials conclude that the death was accidental, caused by Slave’s own rifle. Slave’s only friend, Alberto, is aware of the animosity Jaguar held toward Slave and tells officials of the murder. Those in the upper echelon of the school hierarchy prefer to conceal the scandal that would inevitably follow a revelation of

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the facts. Alberto had written pornographic stories to sell to his peers; school officials use their knowledge of this to blackmail him into silence. The one officer who seems morally capable of questioning the situation, Gamboa, finds his career prospects ruined when he is sent to an isolated post in the provinces. An epilogue tells of the main characters’ lives and careers after leaving the military school. As in many of Faulkner’s novels, in La ciudad y los perros an intricate pattern of plot development and the different temporal and spatial planes of reality make even an understanding of the series of events and relationships among characters a challenging intellectual experience. In all of his novels, as in this first one, suspense and plot development are essential to the reader’s experience. The novel presents itself to the reader as a box of secrets that eventually opens, revealing one after another. The minor and major questions involve both a moral questioning and a puzzle to be solved. The cadets’ internal world is also one of secrets; it is one cadet’s failure to keep a secret that, in the end, is the main catalyst in the novel’s action. In this way, as in Faulkner, Vargas Llosa develops a parallel between theme, structure, and the reader’s experience: all are predicated on the issue of secrecy and solving the enigmas created by this hermetic process. Also as in much of Faulkner, a significant factor in the reader’s experience is the author’s use of a variety of narrators. The multiple firstperson narrations and remaining third-person narrations are not uniform in their revelation of either the interior psychological realities of the characters or the presentation of exterior social reality. The novel features three narrators who function also as characters within the story: Alberto, Boa, and Jaguar. Alberto’s narration is particularly important because of his central role in the novel. His narrative segments are also a combination of the two basic modes of both first and third person. This presentation of Alberto renders him someone whom the reader constantly judges: the dialogue between characters and between discourses makes Alberto a complex character and reveals his inconsistencies. Critics of this novel have correctly viewed its fictional world as a microcosm of Peruvian society. The novel portrays a hierarchical society in which all social relations operate on the basis of dominance or coercion. The value of the text as a denunciation of certain characteristics of Peruvian and Latin American society, however, should not obscure the fact that the use of narrative point of view and other subjectifying factors— what Vargas Llosa calls the elemento añadido, or “added element”—are essential to the total experience of the novel.

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The structure and point of view of La ciudad y los perros are effective vehicles for both depicting the world of the Leoncio Prado military school (this microcosm of Peru) and inviting the reader to participate actively in this creation. Neither this type of structure nor the use of point of view was, in 1963, in itself an innovation. Vargas Llosa had learned well the lessons from Faulkner, using them to tell the story of his traumatic experience as an adolescent. At the end of the novel, however, the Peruvian writer explores a technique of telescoping time that he had found in a passage of Madame Bovary.32 In a conversation in the epilogue of La ciudad y los perros between Skinny Higueras and Jaguar, for example, the dialogue moves immediately to a previous conversation between Teresa and Jaguar, with no written indicator of the temporal jump. This is a Flaubertian technique that allows for the reader’s direct participation in the events presented. The reader of Vargas Llosa’s novels makes adjustments in the reading process to understand these passages, temporarily suspending traditional assumptions about how dialogue works. Narrative techniques such as this telescoping of time, specific to the fiction of Flaubert and now Vargas Llosa, are more fully exploited in his next two full-length novels, La casa verde (1966) and Conversación en La Catedral (1969). «

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Upon completing La ciudad y los perros in 1962, Vargas Llosa was already working on La casa verde. The author’s technical repertoire was now relatively complete in the sense that, by the time he finished La ciudad y los perros, he had found his ways to appropriate the Faulknerian and Flaubertian methods that he needed to tell his own very personal (traumatic) and very Peruvian (critical) story. Before being able to further pursue the writing of La casa verde, however, Vargas Llosa needed to learn more about the Amazon jungle region of Peru that he had first seen briefly in 1958. He returned to Peru in 1964 primarily to revisit the jungle before completing La casa verde. He arranged the trip so that he would be accompanied by the Peruvian anthropologist José Matos Mar. In consultation with Matos Mar, Vargas Llosa took copious notes on the area occupied by the Aguarunas, the Shakras, and the Huambisas in the region of the town of Santa María de Nieva. He spoke with leaders of these local tribes and learned that the situation was still highly problematic in the Peruvian jungle because of the exploitation and abuses of the indigenous peoples by the rubber

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companies. At this time Vargas Llosa also saw indigenous people actually captured by government soldiers and turned over to Catholic missions to be taught Christianity and become “civilized.” Once they were “civilized,” paradoxically, they had no place in either their own former tribes, whose customs they had learned to despise, or in white and mestizo Peruvian society. They would usually be sent to government officials or merchants, destined to be maids or to hold menial jobs. Those who successfully traveled to Lima would be, at best, cooks or, at worst, prostitutes in the capital. Vargas Llosa also learned of the business dealings of the jungle. He met an Aguarana Indian chief named Jum—the same name that will appear in the novel. Jum had been tortured and humiliated by the government soldiers because he had organized the Indians’ rubber commerce in a way that circumvented profits by the (white) middlemen. Another important character in La casa verde, Fushía, was a legend of the jungle whom Vargas Llosa never met but about whom everyone spoke. He was a Japanese merchant who had installed a type of feudal kingdom in the jungle—terrorizing the local indigenous people and exploiting them for their rubber and other merchandise. The case of this particular real-life jungle figure offers a notable example of the peculiar symbiosis between social reality and literary invention: Fushía’s name is confused in both Vargas Llosa’s personal experience and in the novel. The name of this legendary Japanese power-broker was in fact “Tushía.” During the writing process, Vargas Llosa explains in his “secret history,” the “T” of his name was converted into an “F” and the real “Tushía” became a fictional “Fushía.” Tellingly enough, the characters in the novel eventually confuse his name in the same fashion. Near the end of the third part of La casa verde, a lieutenant searching for Fushía asks “What’s his name? Tushía? Fushía?” Soon thereafter, the lieutenant asks, “[W]here had that Tushía hidden? Everything in due time, or Fushía, where was he?”33 In March 1966 Vargas Llosa published La casa verde, arguably his best novel but, at the least, broadly recognized by critics and scholars as one of his major works. Readers familiar with his earlier work immediately recognized the more exhaustive use of telescoped dialogues—far more elaborate than in the fiction of Flaubert. La casa verde consists of four parts and an epilogue, each of which is preceded by a section that could be considered a prologue (although it is not identified as such in the text). Parts I, III, and the epilogue contain four chapters. Parts II and IV have three. The chapters of parts I and II contain five narrative seg-

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ments; those of parts III and IV have four narrative segments. The novel in parts I through IV, then, consist of sixty-three narrative segments, which are generally four to six pages in length. The plot of La casa verde, and its uncanny unfolding, can be likened to the fluvial webs of the Amazon, with its maze of main rivers, tributaries, and small streams, now joining unexpectedly, now virtually disappearing in the thick undergrowth. Despite the weaving of its many stories, the novel offers two broad settings that correspond to two general plots. In the first setting, Piura, in northern Peru, a young man named Anselmo arrives and, after becoming well acquainted with Piura’s inhabitants and ways of life, builds the Green House in the desert on the outskirts of the town. Despite the protests of Father García, the new brothel flourishes. Anselmo kidnaps a blind orphan girl, Antonia, and keeps her in the house, where he fathers the child that causes Antonia’s death in childbirth. The outraged Father García and the women of Piura burn down the Green House. Eventually a second Green House appears in the city proper. Chunga, Anselmo’s daughter by Antonia, is the owner of this night bar. The old Anselmo plays in an orchestra there regularly. The character Lituma challenges a friend, Seminario, to a game of Russian roulette, and the latter’s death results in Lituma’s incarceration. (The always-unfortunate Lituma appears later in Vargas Llosa’s fiction.) His wife, Bonifacia, is seduced by one of his friends and eventually works in Chunga’s Green House as a prostitute. The second setting and main plot, seemingly unrelated to the first, involves the story of indigenous peoples, merchants, government officials, and missionaries in the region of Santa María de Nieva in the Amazon. Government soldiers bring young indigenous girls to the nuns for education at a mission in Santa María. The governor, Reátegui, operates a profitable business by trading for rubber and other goods at a very favorable rate of exchange and then selling the goods in the city of Iquitos. Reátegui tortures the Indian chief Jum for attempting to sell his own goods. One of the several voices that narrate stories related to all these events on the Amazon is that of Fushía. He tells his friend Aquilino of all his operations and the key events of his life. The connection between the two settings of La casa verde is provided by the presence of Lituma as a soldier in the Amazon and his marriage to Bonifacia, who first appeared in the jungle when she was a young indigenous girl living in the mission in Santa María de Nieva. This overview of the novel’s plot in a general sense suggests obvious parallels with Vargas

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Llosa’s anecdotes of his “secret history.” His elaboration of the story as a novel—his use of what he calls the “added element,” elemento añadido— however, makes the experience of reading the novel radically different from what this brief résumé of the plot might suggest. Following up on his use of Flaubert’s telescoped dialogue at the end of La ciudad y los perros, Vargas Llosa expands the use of this technique in La casa verde, making it more complex and considerably more frequent than in his first novel, and probably far beyond anything that even Flaubert had ever imagined. Early in La casa verde, in the first Fushía segment, a dialogue between Fushía and Aquilino develops quickly into a telescoped dialogue, with the intercalation of a previous dialogue between Chango and Iricuo. After this interchange, telescoping appears regularly in the Fushía segments and occasionally in other narrative segments. This technique has two effects. On the 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 novels that present some anecdotes directly and others as indirect experience, La casa verde presents 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 addition to developing the narrative techniques of Faulkner and Flaubert beyond what these two writers had ever done themselves, Vargas Llosa uses a diversity of styles to achieve a broad range of effects. Many traditional forms of written language, such as the traditional sentence and paragraph structure, are dramatically transformed into new forms in La casa verde. The controlling, omniscient narrator occasionally describes the physical setting in a language wrought with images. Metaphorical language suggests the atmosphere of Piura and the jungle, respectively; these scenes are compelling not because of any particularly innovative narrative technique, but as the result of a thoroughly traditional use of suggestive language. The author’s handling of the scene in which Fushía and Aquilino part for the last time is revealing. In this scene, Aquilino observes Fushía in the rain in the jungle. As Aquilino continues withdrawing, he sees “A small pile of living and bloody flesh” that remains motionless in the distance.34 Then Aquilino runs toward some cabins and the passage ends as follows: “It is raining very hard now.”35 This is Fushía’s death scene. We note, however, that the death

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is only suggested by the momentary portrayal of Fushía as a motionless object. In this passage and throughout the book, Vargas Llosa equates physical nature and human beings by means of language that emphasizes neither: both nature and persons are portrayed by means of only brief exterior descriptions. «

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As an active participant in the 1960s Boom, Vargas Llosa traveled extensively and assumed an active role as a public intellectual throughout Latin America in the middle of the decade; increasingly, this was his new public life.36 His personal life changed in the mid-1960s, too: he divorced Julia in 1964 (after a brief separation and reconciliation in 1962), and married Patricia Llosa, a distant relative whom Mario had known since their childhood years. They were married on May 29, 1965, in the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen in Lima. The next day, they traveled to southern Peru, to Arequipa, where they spent a few days with Patricia’s parents. Then they headed to Paris, stopping on the way in Rio de Janeiro, where Mario saw a Brazilian soccer match during the layover. Once they arrived in Paris, they moved into an apartment on the Avenue du Parc des Expositions, where Vargas Llosa finished the novelette Los cachorros (“The Cubs,” which he had begun in late 1965) and where they remained until early 1966, when the novelist went to Buenos Aires to serve on the jury for a novel prize given by Sudamericana—the Primera Plana. Patricia returned to Lima for the birth of their first child, Álvaro, in March. The first edition of Los cachorros, with photographs by Xavier Miserachs, appeared in 1967. It is the story of an adolescent boy who is attacked by a large dog, and suffers the destruction of his genitals; the remainder of the story deals with his change of personality and difficulties in life. With his newfound celebrity, Vargas Llosa found it increasingly difficult to protect his privacy and work without interruptions while living in Paris. Consequently, in late 1966 he and Patricia moved to London, where they settled first in the neighborhood of Cricklewood, in the northern part of the city, and then later in Earl’s Court in the southwest, where they lived in a Georgian home. In London, Vargas Llosa taught some classes at Queen Mary University of London at the same time that he continued his work on Conversación en La Catedral and wrote chronicles for the Peruvian magazine Caretas about his experiences in Great

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Britain. In a piece titled “Visita a Karl Marx” (Visit to Karl Marx), he relates the experience of walking around the Soho district on Dean Street, where Marx lived several years, impoverished, with his family. Despite his limited economic means, Marx went daily to the British Museum to write what would become his major work. Vargas Llosa used this pedestrian excursion through Marx’s Soho as an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between writing and material wealth. Indeed, it was a pertinent subject for him, for even though he was not as impoverished as Marx during the early years in London, Mario and Patricia did live a modest existence. Perhaps even more noteworthy is the parallel between Marx’s economic conditions while writing his major work in London and Vargas Llosa’s borderline poverty in Paris while writing La ciudad y los perros and La casa verde. We say that Flaubert and Faulkner were Vargas Llosa’s principle technical models, and Marx could well be considered his model for exercising Spartan intellectual discipline while living a minimal economic existence. Never before in his life had Vargas Llosa enjoyed public visibility as he did in 1967, quite possibly the most interesting year as a public intellectual in his career. Important in his personal life that year was the birth in September of their second child, Gonzalo, in Lima. Another personal highlight was a trip Vargas Llosa took with Julio Cortázar to Greece as a translator for UNESCO. This oft-cited trip solidified a lifetime relationship with Cortázar that, as mentioned, survived their growing political differences of the 1970s. With respect to Vargas Llosa’s visibility as a public intellectual, he appeared in a public forum in Paris—in the Palais de la Mutualité—with the two most prominent French intellectuals of the 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, all three speaking in defense of Peruvian dissident Hugo Blanco, a guerrilla leader from Cuzco who had been a political activist since 1958. (Vargas Llosa later focused on this early period of armed guerrilla insurrection in his novel Travesuras de la niña mala [2006, Bad Girl]). Blanco had begun his political activism as a campesino leader, organizing strikes and invasions of the land of the old aristocracy. In November of 1962 he attacked a police station in Cuzco and was alleged to have killed a police officer. A national campaign to capture Blanco culminated in his imprisonment in May 1963; he was condemned to twentyfive years in prison. In the same month, the young poet Javier Heraud— about whom Vargas Llosa wrote essays in support—returned from Cuba with a brigade of guerrilla fighters trained by Castro’s government. The armed insurrection and related political activities organized by Blanco,

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Heraud, and other guerrilla leaders created local crises and sometimes violent confrontations with the government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1963–1968), which had followed the government of Manuel Prado (1956– 1962) and a military junta (1962–1963). Prado’s government, upon taking over the power from the Odría dictatorship in 1956, established a convivencia (peace agreement) with the APRA and immediately eliminated all the politically repressive laws of the Odría regime. But Prado was weak on the much-needed agrarian reforms in a nation where the same large landowners (latifundistas) had possession of land that they had not used productively and efficiently for centuries. The economic program of Belaúnde Terry was more progressive on land reform, but still did not successfully create peace and economic justice on the rural front. To the contrary, the government’s failures resulted in the formation of even more armed guerrilla activity, producing in 1965 the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, or Leftist Revolutionary Movement), organized by Luis de la Puente Uceda, and the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or Army of National Liberation), headed by Héctor Béjar. This complex and difficult panorama of early 1960s Peru was the backdrop for Vargas Llosa’s commentary at La Mutualité in the presence of Sartre and Beauvoir, as well as for the novel Historia de Mayta. Vargas Llosa’s other activities as a high-visibility public intellectual in Latin America took place in Caracas, Bogotá, and Lima in 1967. On August 4, 1967, Vargas Llosa delivered his acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Caracas; at the time, this was the most prestigious literary prize of the Spanish language. The other celebrity intellectuals of the Boom and related to the Boom, such as Gabriel García Márquez and Ángel Rama, took part in the festivities in Caracas that evening, when Vargas Llosa delivered one of his most powerful public lectures, “La literatura es fuego” (Literature is fire). In this period, the Uruguayan critics Ángel Rama and Emir Rodríguez Monegal were writing enthusiastic essays about the new phenomenon of the “Boom” of the Latin American novel. Vargas Llosa opened his lecture in Caracas with a moving reference to an overlooked Peruvian poet, Carlos Oquendo de Amat. This poet, who died in relative obscurity, seemed to embody the spirit of Peruvian writers and intellectual activists in general: like Oquendo de Amat, they had delivered their poetic or political message, were perhaps briefly noted in Peru, and inevitably died unknown. Many of the literary and political figures that Vargas Llosa admired and about whom he had written were, in fact, Oquendo de Amat figures. “Literature is fire,” however,

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was not an entirely pessimistic lecture about the failures of Peruvian intellectuals. To the contrary, the thirty-one-year-old Vargas Llosa offered an equally moving revolutionary tone in the remainder of his speech, calling on the Latin American writer to assume his role as a political agent and supporter of radical social change. Thus, literature, according to Vargas Llosa, could be fire. This was, clearly, the speech of a Peruvian intellectual who had grown up reading Mariátegui and who still held Sartre as an idol. (Years later, Vargas Llosa has recognized that much of his revolutionary writing of the 1960s, which he now rejects, was a paraphrasing of Sartre’s essays on politics and literature.) «

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Vargas Llosa and García Márquez had corresponded by letter before that August, but it was in Caracas at the Rómulo Gallegos festivities that they met in person for the first time, and they seemed to get along very well from the beginning. In the month leading up to the meeting in Caracas, García Márquez had suddenly become a celebrity in his own right, as the Argentine edition (Sudamericana) of Cien años de soledad was selling as an instant bestseller in a manner unprecedented in the Hispanic world. After the activities in Caracas, Vargas Llosa and García Márquez traveled together to Bogotá, where the cultural center (and journal) Letras Nacionales offered an homage to Vargas Llosa. Many of the most important intellectuals in Colombia at the time—Jorge Zalamea, León de Greiff, Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, and Manuel Zapata Olivella—attended this event. This trip to Colombia was memorable for at least two reasons. On the one hand, the series of events during those months (publication of Cien años de soledad; Rómulo Gallegos Prize and acceptance speech; homage in Bogotá; the dialogue in Lima) made this period of 1967 arguably the zenith of the 1960s Boom of the Latin American novel. On the other hand, the trip to Bogotá marked the symbolic birth of another of Vargas Llosa’s books, his exhaustive critical study of García Márquez’s entire work up to 1970. In the early 1970s, Vargas Llosa’s research and writing culminated in his publication of García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (García Márquez: history of a deicide), the most informed early study of García Márquez’s work.37 In September Vargas Llosa and García Márquez traveled from Bogotá to Lima, where they engaged in a public dialogue on politics and literature. In this discussion, they set forth together what became some of their most-cited statements as socially and

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politically committed writers favoring a radical transformation of the old structures of Latin American society. Again, much of the language they employed had its roots in Sartre’s essays on the engagé intellectual. Their dialogue appeared in print in Spanish under the title La novela en América Latina: Diálogo (1968). By the time Vargas Llosa left Lima in late 1967, he had conceived of two new writing projects: the critical study on García Márquez and his third novel, Conversación en La Catedral, the latter of which he began writing in Lima. In early 1968, Vargas Llosa visited Ireland (a nation which became important decades later for the writing of El sueño del celta), Finland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Spain. The writers of the Boom traveled together through the old Soviet bloc; Vargas Llosa was with Fuentes, García Márquez, and other Latin American writers. In general, their enthusiasm for the Soviet model waned after experiencing firsthand the quality of daily life in Eastern Europe in 1968. After this trip, Vargas Llosa returned to London, where he continued working on Conversación en La Catedral. Vargas Llosa and Patricia moved to Pullman, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States in the autumn of 1968. The writer had accepted his first teaching position in the States as a visiting professor (his official title was “artist in residence”) at Washington State University. His translator into German, Wolfgang A. Luchting, was a member of the faculty in Washington and had nominated Vargas Llosa for this position; this isolated, provincial campus lacked the cultural life not only of Paris or London, but even of Lima. During this semester-long stay, Vargas Llosa worked on Conversación en La Catedral, taught a graduate seminar on García Márquez, delivered three public lectures, and often spoke in the hallways of his admiration for Flaubert.38 The graduate seminar at Washington State on García Márquez afforded Vargas Llosa the opportunity to work on the García Márquez project at the same time that he fulfilled his teaching duties and dedicated himself daily to the writing of what would be the most lengthy of his novels, Conversación en La Catedral. Living in a home rented from a faculty member on leave, Vargas Llosa submerged himself in the basement each morning to work on his third novel. The public lectures delivered on the campus of Washington State University that fall focused on the Latin American novel and some of Vargas Llosa’s own work. His first lecture was an introductory overview to the Latin American novel in the twentieth century, a markedly critical and lightly humorous series of remarks about classic authors of the 1920s

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and 1930s—Rómulo Gallegos, José Eustacio Rivera, Ricardo Guiraldes, and the like. This lecture was only one of the numerous critiques the writers of the Boom directed toward their predecessors. Some scholars have considered Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and García Márquez to have been excessively critical of this Latin American literary tradition, which García Márquez once called a “fraud” and both Fuentes and Vargas Llosa labeled as “primitive.” As committed literary modernists, however, they did feel an understandable need to distinguish themselves from all their predecessors, who were still writing strictly within the limits of what was fundamentally a nineteenth-century realist-naturalist tradition until the 1940s. Vargas Llosa’s lectures at Washington State were in English; the second one was an early version, in English, of what eventually became his long essay (or short book) titled Historia secreta de una novela (1971, Secret History of a Novel). This is a personal and provocative narrative about how the novel La casa verde came into being. The successes of this lecture and its subsequent publication were multiple; it is one of the primary examples of how Vargas Llosa and the other writers of the Boom not only wrote fiction that was innovative and engaging in the 1960s, but also published essays and interviews that, in effect, created a readership and sometimes even suggested new ways of reading this fiction. Cortázar’s novel Rayuela (1963, Hopscotch), Fuentes’s essay La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969, The new Spanish American novel), and Vargas Llosa’s Historia secreta de una novela are among the best examples of this type of critical work. In the late 1960s, after finishing his residency at Washington State University, and as he assumed other teaching positions, Vargas Llosa was seriously considering the possibility of pursuing an academic career as a way of ensuring his economic security. He was understandably unsure about the viability of a professional career based strictly on writing, for there were no precedents in Peru: no Peruvian writer had successfully made a full-time professional career based exclusively on writing novels and essays. Vargas Llosa taught at the University of Puerto Rico in early 1969 while still considering both options: life as a novelist who occasionally teaches and life as an academic who writes novels and essays on weekends. He pursued both projects while at the University of Puerto Rico. On the one hand, he began the actual writing of his book on García Márquez, which he planned to present as a doctoral dissertation, giving him the PhD degree he would need to assume a regular, full-time academic position. On the other, he completed his third full-length novel,

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Conversación en La Catedral, in early 1969. As he weighed both possibilities, the advice of his literary agent in Barcelona, Carmen Balcells, was important: she argued forcefully that Mario Vargas Llosa could indeed make writing novels a full-time professional career. His teaching positions during this decision-making period were at the University of Puerto Rico in 1969 and King’s College in London in 1970. In the end, after the most definitive of his several decisions in favor of pursing his chosen career as a professional, full-time writer, he moved from London (and access to British universities) to Barcelona, with the idea of completing two books: his study of García Márquez’s fiction and the next novel, Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service). He made this move to Barcelona after the appearance of Conversación en La Catedral. Conversación en La Catedral is Vargas Llosa’s lengthiest novel and the most elaborate of his modernist texts. His only other novel of such epic proportions was to be the later La guerra del fin del mundo (1981, The War of the End of the World). Vargas Llosa was a novelist who had launched his career with the intention of modernizing the Peruvian and Latin American novel; Conversación en La Catedral was the culmination of that plan. This was also Vargas Llosa’s most explicitly political project, focusing as it does on the Odría dictatorship in Peru. In some ways comparable to García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad and Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Conversación en La Catedral is one of those “total” novels about which the writers of the Boom spoke in the 1960s. Indeed, Fuentes, in La nueva novela hispanoamericana, and Vargas Llosa, in his book on García Márquez, extol the virtues of exploring the possibilities of the totalizing impulse and the “total” novel (see my epilogue). This third novel, then, is Vargas Llosa’s attempt to fictionalize the totality of Peruvian social and political history in the 1950s. The intensification and elaboration of elements found in the first two novels also reveal the roots of the totalizing impulse so evident in this novel. As in the two previous novels, Conversación en La Catedral has a strong plot that in itself is an important element. The structure, however, marks a change: it is the author’s first novel without a systematic division of narrative segments within all the chapters. Vargas Llosa originally planned to publish it as a four-part book in four separate volumes. No edition was published in this manner, but the first edition in Spanish did consist of two separate volumes. Later editions in Spanish, and the English version, have been printed in one volume.

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Each of the four parts of Conversación en La Catedral is composed of between four and ten chapters. Part I (190 pages) consists of ten numbered chapters with no formal division within any of them. Part II (134  pages) has nine numbered chapters, each of which is formally divided into eight to twelve unnumbered, brief narrative segments, which range in length from one to three pages. Part III (133 pages) consists of four numbered chapters which, like part I, have no formal divisions. Part IV (134 total pages) has eight numbered chapters which, like Part II, have unnumbered narrative segments. Each chapter has either three or four of these narrative segments, which range in length from three to seven pages. Part I relates the early years of the Odría regime, beginning approximately in 1948. Odría himself does not appear directly in part I (nor anywhere else in the novel). The two main characters portrayed in part I are Santiago Zavala and Cayo Bermúdez. Santiago is the son of Fermín Zavala, an affluent businessman belonging to Peru’s powerful oligarchy. Cayo Bermúdez is the director of security for Odría’s government. Part I encompasses Santiago’s years as a student at the University of San Marcos and Don Cayo’s rise from anonymity to a position of supreme power in the Peruvian government. The novel actually begins in the “present” of the 1960s. The nowthirty-two-year-old Santiago Zavala encounters Ambrosio Pardo, former chauffeur for Santiago’s father, Fermín, and also for Cayo Bermúdez. Ambrosio works at a dog pound, where Santiago goes to claim his missing dog. The two spend four hours in intense dialogue at a bar called The Cathedral. Their dialogue, in turn, is transmuted into other dialogues and anecdotes, which in their totality relate the story of their respective lives and those of many other individuals during the period from about 1948 to the early 1960s. Santiago’s story begins with his conflicts within his family. Unlike his brother, Sparky, and his sister, Teté, he is unwilling to accept the social values of his oligarchical family or the policies it supports. Against the wishes of his family, Santiago insists upon study at San Marcos, a university open to working-class students and, as viewed by the oligarchy, associated with leftist politics. Santiago does become involved in politics with a group of students. He and Jacobo vie for the attention of Aída. Betrayed by Jacobo, Santiago loses Aída to him. Santiago continues his readings of Marxist texts and, reviewing that period in retrospect, observes that he used to envy people who had a blind faith in

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something. At the end of part I, Santiago is arrested as a consequence of his political activities. He decides, then, to leave his family’s home and live independently—quitting school to work at La Crónica. Cayo Bermúdez’s story begins in the third chapter of part I. His exclassmate, General Espina, brings him from a town in the provinces, Chincha, to become the Peruvian director of security in 1948. Don Cayo’s rise to power—from his previous role as an obscure local businessman in Chincha—is spectacular and horrifying. He soon becomes Odría’s “other self,” as he is described in the text. His basic method, as recounted in the seventh chapter, is to acquire power by overstepping and neutralizing everyone in the government except Odría himself. Don Cayo’s story blends directly with Santiago’s for the first time at the end of part I. When Santiago is arrested for his political activity, he is in the hands of Don Cayo. Many other characters, some of whom grow in importance later in the novel, appear in part I. Ambrosio is present as Don Cayo’s chauffeur. A chapter featuring the characters Amalia and Trinidad provides a working-class point of view on the political events of the period. The reader observes Fermín not only as Santiago’s father but also as one of Don Cayo’s collaborators from the business sector. People, places, and events that initially seem to be unrelated appear in part I. The reader does not find a broad clarification of all the details, but rather has the aesthetic pleasure of participating in the unfolding of a pattern. The initial signal to the reader that this is a book of patterns (as an accomplished modernist novel), rather than incoherent fragmentation, can be found early in the first chapter: Santiago mentions his newspaper campaign against rabies, and later in the same chapter he meets Ambrosio, who has found employment at a dog pound precisely because of the newspaper campaign. It is a coincidence that provides the reader with an initial assurance that this is a novel in which happenings will eventually fit together. Nevertheless, part I does project some unanswerable questions. Brief dialogues with Fermín speaking appear in the text inexplicably. These dialogues involving Fermín (and Ambrosio) will appear throughout the novel, but cannot be fully understood until part IV, when it is revealed that Ambrosio has, surreptitiously, been Fermín’s homosexual partner; the secret dialogues have been between them. Similarly, there is an ongoing dialogue between Santiago and Carlos throughout the eighth chapter of part I for which the reader will have no context until later in the novel. In both cases, these are the “tele-

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scoped dialogues” initially explored in Madame Bovary, La ciudad y los perros, and La casa verde. Part II places more emphasis on Don Cayo and Ambrosio. Don Cayo now has absolute power in the Odría government. His men—Ambrosio, Ludovico, Hipólito, and others—carry out this systematic manipulation of the political scene: they organize political rallies that give the appearance of mass support for Odría; they repress and terrify the government’s opposition parties; they respond to all of Don Cayo’s personal and political whims. Don Cayo’s private wishes involve sexual perversity; he takes voyeuristic pleasure in watching lesbian activities. Ambrosio, too, appears in the context of a love affair with his girlfriend and wife-to-be, Amalia. Santiago, now working at La Crónica and isolated from his family, meets occasionally with his uncle Clodomiro. His brother, Sparky, eventually contacts him, too. A strike that takes place at the end of part II appears to mark the end of Odría’s regime. Don Cayo is rumored to have escaped to Brazil. Part III features the most frenetic activity of the novel. The first chapter begins with melodrama: Santiago and his colleagues at La  Crónica go to the scene of Hortensia’s death to investigate the story of her being knifed. Don Cayo’s loss of power develops concurrently with the downfall of the house of prostitution he had supported in the neighborhood of San Miguel. Chaos in both the narration and the story ensue in the last chapter, the fourth. Don Cayo sends Ludovico and a gang of thugs to the city of Arequipa to interrupt an anti-government rally there. A plethora of telescoped dialogues, some by telephone, relate the story of the gang’s sound defeat: some die and others barely escape alive. Don Cayo and his government have lost in their final attempt to control Peru. Part IV further develops certain personal relationships and bestows upon the reader long-awaited revelations. Santiago scandalizes his parents by marrying Ana, a girl of far too humble origins for the social stature of the Zavala family in a nation as hierarchical as Peru. He also repudiates the family one last time by refusing to discuss the inheritance after Fermín’s death. Ambrosio marries Amalia and they move to Pucallpa, where he attempts, unsuccessfully, to operate a business with a friend. Throughout part IV there is an ongoing dialogue between Ambrosio and the prostitute whose services he uses, Queta. It is in conversations with her that Fermín’s homosexual relationship with Ambrosio is revealed. Fermín had abused him sexually during visits to Ancón.

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The novel ends, as it had begun, in the “present” of the dialogue between Santiago and Ambrosio in The Cathedral. Almost all the pieces of a narrative puzzle—as the ideal modernist text—have fallen together by the conclusion of the novel: the work is very much a whole, with a sense of closure. In the end, the reader gets to know the truth about many of the details related to the plot, but Vargas Llosa, as always, leaves numerous ambiguities. The reader is offered many possible truths in the novel, but most are relative: truth, like empirical reality, is amorphous and is only a matter of circumstance and situation. As the circumstances and situations change, so does an established sense of truth and reality. The reader never apprehends the full truth, for example, behind the death of Hortensia. It would also be a difficult proposition for the reader to answer Santiago’s persistent question, posed from the novel’s first page: at what precise moment had Peru “fucked itself up”? This has as its corollary question: “at what precise moment did Santiago fuck himself up?” Other questions and ambiguities remain concerning the characters’ motives and the nature of Peru. Metaphorically speaking, all of the anecdotes within the novel emanate from the original four-hour conversation between Santiago and Ambrosio at The Cathedral. The conversation leads to multiple associations and other dialogues in the past. Such a generalization can only be metaphorical and not literal, however, since much of what supposedly emanates from the Santiago-Ambrosio dialogue could never have been known by either of them. In technical terms, there are three sources of information, or three authoritative narrators: Santiago, Ambrosio, and the omniscient narrator outside the story. Jean Franco has made comparisons between Conversación en La Catedral and Camus’s The Fall.39 She notes that Vargas Llosa’s novel can also be compared to Sartre’s The Reprieve: as in The Reprieve, there are moments when the “characters” are named but then dissolve back into the chorus of the text so that their discourse is identifiable only when new information becomes available to the reader. Her comparison between Conversación en La Catedral and The Fall is based on the parallel between the “confession” made by Clamance in a “church”—the Mexico City Bar in Amsterdam—and the “confession” that Santiago makes to Ambrosio in their “church,” “The Cathedral” bar in Lima. This analysis leads to Franco’s insightful observation about the conversation between Santiago and Ambrosio: what takes place in Conversación en La Catedral is not a true dialogue between the journalist Santiago and the ex-chauffeur Ambrosio, but rather separate recollections that take the

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form of dismembered dialogues with other people in the past. Franco concludes that Vargas Llosa, like Sartre and Camus, focuses the reader’s attention beyond the creation of individual characters. Paradoxically, each of these three writers emphasizes the role of the individual in society, yet each creates literary projections of the individual that verge on impersonality. Seen in the context of Faulkner, Conversación en La Catedral offers noteworthy comparisons as well, particularly with the novel Sanctuary. Mary Davis has compared Vargas Llosa’s Cayo Bermúdez to Faulkner’s Popeye.40 Davis observes that Vargas Llosa amplifies Faulkner’s method of characterization: whereas in Sanctuary Popeye’s relationship with other characters is by means of objects, that of Cayo Bermúdez is by means of intermediary characters. Vargas Llosa also creates an atmosphere similar to Faulkner’s. In addition, Conversación en La Catedral and Light in August have comparable plot development: Faulkner never clearly reveals that Joe Christmas killed Joanna Burden, and Vargas Llosa leaves the death of Hortensia (“the Muse”) ambiguous. With Conversación en La Catedral, Vargas Llosa goes not only well beyond Flaubert in his use of telescoped dialogues, but also far beyond the telescoped dialogues in his own previous novel, La casa verde. The type of dialogue pioneered in Madame Bovary and La ciudad y los perros, and then fully developed in La casa verde, is more fully exploited 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 complexity he creates telescoped dialogues with as many as three different conversations in juxtaposition. Conversación en La Catedral, however, showcases as many as eighteen dialogues operating simultaneously (part III, chapter 4). This intense chapter, relating a political revolt in Arequipa, contains juxtaposed dialogues taking place in different parts of Peru. The physical action of the chapter takes place in Arequipa, but most of the dialogues take place in Lima and other places outside of Arequipa. Vargas Llosa achieves several effects by his use of telescoped dialogues and similar techniques. The intricate set of eighteen dialogues dealing with the Arequipa incident offers a simultaneous insider’s and outsider’s view of the events at hand. Characters like Ludovico and Ambrosio are the insiders, and are able to tell the story as participants; the dialogues with Don Cayo, Fermín, and others communicate how the event was perceived from the outside—in addition to the role they had as distant participants from Lima. The juxtaposition of dialogues affords

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the reader the opportunity to observe and judge the contradictions and paradoxes of different situations. «

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Now settled into Barcelona after the publication of Conversación en La Catedral, Vargas Llosa recommitted himself to his lifetime goal: to be a writer as a full-time profession. He and Patricia lived in Barcelona as their primary residence from 1970 to 1974, the year their third child, Morgana, was born. The writer’s work in Barcelona was to complete two books: García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio and Pantaleón y las visitadoras. The Vargas Llosa family lived in the Sarrià neighborhood of Barcelona, two blocks from García Márquez, his wife Mercedes, and their young children. These were the “soft” years of the Franco dictatorship (the dictablanda), years in which Latin American writers still lived amid the glory of the Boom and with a certain optimism about the potential role of culture in society at large: they had the conviction that literature was transforming the world.41 In 1970 and 1971 in Barcelona, the writers of the Boom seemed to enjoy a relatively close friendship, and these were positive years for Vargas Llosa’s still-good relationship with all of them. There are entertaining anecdotes, for example, about their friendships, such as the Christmas Eve of 1971 when Vargas Llosa and Cortázar borrowed the children’s gifts out of their boxes and used the small remote-control electric toy cars to compete against each other in a race. Seen in retrospect, the phenomenon of the Boom (approximately 1962–1972) always involved a certain tension between, on the one hand, some literary and political commonalities that often brought these writers together and, on the other, political differences that created distances. The factors that brought them together (or at least created an aura of unity) were the Catalonian publishing house Seix Barral, the Cuban Revolution, the organs Marcha in Montevideo and Mundo Nuevo in Paris, the critical work of Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Ángel Rama, the Catalonian literary agent Carmen Balcells, and the North American translator Gregory Rabassa. The presence of these individuals and entities made the 1960s Boom of the Latin American novel, as we know it, possible. During the entire decade of the Boom, nevertheless, there were political differences that created ongoing problems, some of which became untenable by the early 1970s. In the most informed insider’s view of the Boom, José Donoso’s Historia personal del “Boom” (Personal his-

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tory of the “Boom”), it is evident, for example, that Donoso himself was relatively indifferent to politics when he and Fuentes participated in a conference in Concepción, Chile, in 1962. According to Donoso, Fuentes took the initiative in politicizing this otherwise “literary” conference, and it was Fuentes who, in effect, politicized Donoso. Indeed, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez, given their intellectual backgrounds and life experience with authoritarian power in their own respective nations in the 1950s, were in the vanguard, as enthusiastic supporters of many leftist political causes in the early 1960s, including their enthusiastic support of the Cuban Revolution. Donoso and Cortázar were relatively indifferent to politics in the early 1960s, and were friends and allies with Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and García Márquez at the outset, primarily out of a common literary interest: the deepseated commitment all five writers (as well as Alejo Carpentier, Salvador Garmendia, and a host of others) had to modernizing what they considered an embarrassingly backward, anachronistic, and provincial literary tradition in Latin America. Vargas Llosa himself had two widely known passions in the early 1960s: Flaubert and the Cuban Revolution. In the nascent period of the Boom, it was their enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution that Fuentes and Vargas Llosa shared, the unprecedented commercial success of La ciudad y los perros in its Spanish edition, and then the publication of Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962, The Death of Artemio Cruz), and Cortázar’s Rayuela that provided the initial impetus for the Boom. By the mid-1960s, however, Vargas Llosa had a growing number of doubts about the direction of Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba, particularly in the areas of human rights and freedom of expression. The most public of these concerns surfaced in the form of his public letter to Cuban official Haydée Santamaría. During the Barcelona period in the early 1970s, then, the personal, political, and literary relations among these five writers (Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Cortázar, García Márquez, and Donoso), as well as the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, were friendly on the surface, but in reality complex and often strained. Although they were interested in principle in a joint project to publish a literary, cultural, and political magazine in the early 1970s—for which Goytisolo might have served as editor—this project only served to aggravate the differences among these public intellectuals. The last time that all five of them were together in the same social space was in 1970 in southern France, in Avignon, for the opening night of Fuentes’s play El tuerto es rey as part of a theater festival.

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The more public affair that created unresolved differences among the writers of the Boom involved the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. Censored and eventually jailed for writing poetry that the Cuban government deemed anti-revolutionary, Padilla became a cause célèbre for those intellectuals, including Vargas Llosa and Fuentes, who prized the defense of human rights over the need to support the Cuban Revolution. García Márquez and Cortázar, however, disagreed with Vargas Llosa and Fuentes, and remained fully committed to supporting Castro’s government. The Vargas Llosa of the 1970s who began distancing himself from some of his most cherished causes of the 1960s also began to distance himself from his known models of novelizing. Most evident in this respect was his temporary rejection of the impulse for that lengthy and dense “total” novel that had driven, increasingly, each of his novelistic plans in the 1960s. His two novels of the 1970s, Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor were generally shorter and less demanding than his previous novels. Read in isolation, these two novels are hardly recognizable as words written by an author who held Flaubert and Faulkner as his ideal models. The melodramatic aspects of life initially explored in the second half of Conversación en La Catedral are fully exploited in these two later novels, and exaggerated to humorous proportions. Scholars and general readers who are either unable or unwilling to distinguish between seriousness and sobriety might well be unsatisfied with these serious but unsober novels. The source of the humor in these two novels of the 1970s is situational: Pantaleón y las visitadoras is the author’s raucous satire of one of the most consistent targets of criticism, the military; the comic humor of La tía Julia y el escribidor arises from a variety of sources but above all from his use of melodramatic radio soap operas and self-parody. These two novels (along with three other novels published much later in his career, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? [1986, Who Killed Palomino Molero?], Elogio de la madrasta [1988, In Praise of the Stepmother], and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto [1997, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto]) are his first of five “entertainments.”42 In retrospect, Vargas Llosa’s turn toward humor was not without precedents. The melodramatic situations in Conversación en La Catedral, such as Amalia’s love life and Santiago Zavala’s marriage, would bring a smile were it not for the dismal context within which they are played out. The incongruities that permeate all of Vargas Llosa’s novels are even more prominent in the two novels of the 1970s and are the basis for much of their humor. The juxtaposition of the characters’ blatantly

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contradictory statements, achieved by the telescoping of dialogues in the early novels, creates paradoxes with humorous potential. In Conversación en La Catedral Santiago Zavala explains his college days to Ambrosio: “Revolutions, books, museums. Do you see what it is to be pure?” The uneducated Ambrosio responds: “I thought being pure was living without fucking, son.”43 Such an exchange reveals a writer with an eye for the incongruities that are the stuff of humor. When Pantaleón y las visitadoras appeared in Spanish in 1973, it was part of a general trend in Latin American fiction toward an accessibility that had not characterized many of the major novels of the 1960s, including Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral. The idea of a “total novel” had produced such landmark works as García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), Vargas Llosa’s Conversación en La Catedral, and José Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970, The Obscene Bird of the Night). Although accessibility was obviously not an important issue for many eminent Latin American novelists in the late 1960s, by the early 1970s a general reaction had set in against these hermetic tomes. Vargas Llosa himself, years later, admits that he became more interested in his readers after writing his first three novels (see Vargas Llosa’s explanation in my epilogue). One example of this more accessible fiction in Latin America was a series of entertaining fantasies that García Márquez published in 1972: La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y su abuela desalmada (The Incredible and Sad Story of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother). The young Mexican novelist Gustavo Sainz, whose previous books had been limited to a primarily intellectual reading public, published a humorous bestseller in 1974: La princesa del Palacio de Hierro. Writers of the then-designated “Postboom,” such as Antonio Skármeta and Luisa Valenzuela, were disinterested in technical experimentation.44 It was within this general context—a period during which a large contingent of self-assured and well-established authors began to write a more accessible fiction—frequently in the humorous vein of Pantaleón y las visitadoras—that this novel appeared. Set in Iquitos, the Peruvian Amazon jungle, Pantaleón y las visitadoras tells the story of a military officer par excellence, Captain Pantaleón Pantoja. His superiors send him to the jungle to solve a problem that had proven embarrassing for the government: the soldiers posted in these remote areas had been molesting the local young women with alarming frequency and gravity. Pantoja receives orders to go to Iquitos as an undercover officer and organize regular institutional sexual activ-

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ity for the soldiers. His astonishing success at this enterprise, in addition to other local factors beyond his control, eventually causes his downfall. Both his methodical approach to the task and the bizarre anecdotes that accompany this central story—such as the presence of a fanatical religious cult—make the story often hilarious. The first chapter, written entirely in dialogue, introduces Pantoja’s organizational work by showing him receiving his assignment and underlining his ability as an organizer. Others characterize him as an “innate organizer” with a “mathematical sense of order, executive capacity,” and an “organizing brain.” The midpoint and end chapters are exclusively dialogue, as is the first, whereas the remaining chapters portray Pantoja’s organizing by means of military documents, messages, letters, newspaper articles, and conversations. These communications appear in addition to short passages related by an omniscient narrator. In the second chapter Pantoja himself describes the intimate details of his organization via official communiqués, all supported by data in scientific experiments. By the third chapter, Pantoja’s mania for organization reaches such extremes that he relies on a stopwatch to calculate precisely his own sexual performance with his wife. Approximately halfway through the novel, Pantoja’s failure is precipitated by his success as organizer, for his operation has acquired its own dynamics, over which the military fears it has lost control. A turning point in Pantoja’s enterprise is a public denunciation by a local radio commentator named Sinchi. On his special program, “The Voice of Sinchi,” the radio announcer asks rhetorically how long the citizens of Loreto are going to continue tolerating the “shameful spectacle” which is the existence of the “Special Service.” He denounces the captain as unlawful and unprincipled. Sinchi encourages one of Pantoja’s ex-employees, a prostitute named Maclovia, to tell her story on the air. As expected, Pantoja’s success as an organizer causes his doom: he loses his position in the jungle and is assigned to a remote and undesirable provincial town. (Pantoja is basically the failed Lituma figure of other Vargas Llosa novels.) Several of Vargas Llosa’s recurrent themes and preoccupations (the military, for example) and oft-used techniques (such as telescoped dialogues) are present in Pantaleón y las visitadoras. But the complete change in tone and new narrative techniques of this novel underscore the author’s versatility. In addition to being an entertainment, this novel is, like the previous work, subversively critical of the society that it describes.

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Vargas Llosa articulates social commentary by devices through which the incongruities in the process of organizing are observed. He consistently juxtaposes sexual proclivity with the military repression of such impulses. The point of departure for such juxtaposition occurs in the initial conversation between Pantoja and his wife, Pocha, in the first paragraph. In this playful conversation, in which she calls him “Captain Pantoja” but then “honey” and “my little lieutenant,” the initial confluence of the personal intimate life and the military code appears. A similar technique, and effect, can be observed in the first communiqué sent by Pantoja. His mathematical calculations of the length of time involved in the sexual act and the number of monthly sex acts necessary to enable the soldiers to perform their military functions at their best are a similar humorous juxtaposition of the military and the intimate. Once the operation becomes a quasi-official part of the military superstructure, the effect of the juxtaposition loses its humor. Incongruities become apparent through the emphasis placed on the values and mentality of the military. An important example of this emphasis is a statement by Pantoja at the beginning of the novel, when, upon receiving his order to organize as a civilian, he is told by General Scavino to always “think as an officer.”45 His actions, and those of his colleagues, should be understood precisely as such: the manifestation of a military mentality. Another significant aspect of the values apparent in the novel is its exaltation of machismo. The focal point of the anecdote is the degrading and mechanized sexual practices that Pantoja institutionalizes. The point of departure for such mechanization is Pantoja’s initial scientific investigation. The operation is conceived to provide for maximum “efficiency.” Although surely a less demanding reading experience than Vargas Llosa’s previous novels, Pantaleón y las visitadoras exemplifies the precise control of narration that is a consistent mark of his work. Consideration of Pantoja’s organization (the content) and of Vargas Llosa’s organization (the structure) reveals a novel that is a parody of military organization in both form and content. This correspondence between content and form, theme and technique, results in an aesthetic experience for the reader and implies a critical function of the work with regard to Peruvian society. Fanatic attitudes lend themselves to humor, and Vargas Llosa adroitly exploits the comic potential of obsessive characters in this novel. He has consistently shown a certain fascination with fanatics, such as Father García in La casa verde and Cayo Bermúdez in Conversación en

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La Catedral, but Pantaleón y las visitadoras is the first novel that features a humorous portrayal of a fanatic who is a major character.

The Mature Writer (1975– 1991) In the period from 1975 to 1991 Mario Vargas Llosa was a highprofile public intellectual throughout the Hispanic world, and was often called upon in public dialogues and academic conferences throughout the world. These were the celebrity years of the mature novelist, who remained highly productive, publishing an ongoing set of essays and six novels during this period. The novelistic centerpiece of these years was the epic work La guerra del fin del mundo; his other novels were Historia de Mayta, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, El hablador, and Elogio de la madrastra. This was also the period of Vargas Llosa’s most direct intervention in Peruvian politics: he was a candidate for the presidency of Peru, losing the election in the final round to Alberto Fujimori. In mid-1974 the Vargas Llosa family moved to Lima, which was their principal residence during the 1974–1991 period, although they frequently traveled to London, and Mario accepted invitations for lectures on several continents. He spent the year 1980 in Washington, DC, a key year for his future political thought, because of the birth of his interest in free-market economies and classic liberal political thought. Each of his early novels had received a recognition or award; in this period of the 1970s and 1980s, he received numerous awards in the Hispanic world and Europe.46 Beginning in the 1980s, his name occasionally appeared on unofficial but well-informed short lists for the Nobel Prize for Literature, although the recipients of this prize who wrote in Spanish were instead the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Mexican Octavio Paz, and the Spaniard Camilo José Cela. He was also honored by a growing number of colleges and universities, who invited him to conferences organized in his honor; World Literature Today of the University of Oklahoma invited him to one of their celebrated international conferences (as they had for several writers prior to their receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, as well as for Julio Cortázar), and the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana invited him to Madrid in 1984. His arrival in Lima in 1974 marked the first time he had taken permanent residence in Peru since 1958. All of his fiction, with the exception of his early stories, had been written abroad, and Vargas Llosa had occasionally mentioned the advantages of maintaining a distance from

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Peru in order to deal with his traumas, obsessions, and “demons” (demonios). Accordingly, before returning to Lima, he completed a lengthy essay in Mallorca, which appeared in 1975 under the title La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary. The first part of this book was a narrative about his personal relationship with Madame Bovary; the second part is an academic study of this novel. This was his second book-length expression of his ideas about the writer’s “demons,” his personal literary preferences, and related items very particular to Vargas Llosa’s own special way of reading as a writer.47 Between 1975 and 1991 Vargas Llosa was constantly traveling, and in 1975 he spent a few weeks in the Dominican Republic to co-direct, with José María Gutiérrez, the film version of Pantaleón y las visitadoras. This film was not a great success, but his stay in the Caribbean was the origin of a later novel on a former dictator of the Dominican Republic, La fiesta del Chivo (2000, The Feast of the Goat). Vargas Llosa was elected president of the Pen Club International in 1976, a position that gave him the opportunity to actively pursue one of his lifetime concerns: the defense of freedom of the press, human rights, and writers imprisoned throughout the world. His travels this year included a stay of several months in Israel, where he delivered lectures at the University of Jerusalem. It was in 1977, the year he assumed the position of Simón Bolívar Chair at Cambridge University, that he surprised his reading public with another light and humorous novel, the second of his six entertainments, under the title La tía Julia y el escribidor. The fanatic character in this novel is a writer, Pedro Camacho, one of the most unforgettable creations in a body of work replete with fanatic and unforgettable characters. Camacho is the prolific author of soap operas that are broadcast on the radio—an author who takes himself more seriously than a Balzac or a Sartre. (The reader is invited to imagine parallels with the writers of the Boom, all of whom cited Balzac and Sartre in the 1960s.) The principal source of entertainment for us is Camacho. The protagonist, however, is not this Balzacian fabricator of home entertainment but a young, aspiring writer quite similar to Mario Vargas Llosa—and some of the other writers of the Boom. The protagonist, in fact, is modeled after his creator, and is even named “Marito.” Both Pedro Camacho and Marito relate directly to Vargas Llosa’s life. In the early 1950s Vargas Llosa was in charge of news bulletins for Radio Panamericana in Lima. He had contact with a Bolivian attached to a neighboring station, Radio Central, also owned by the backers of Radio Panamericana. This Bolivian was, according to Vargas Llosa, quite a

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colorful person and was responsible for all the scripts in the soap operas that headlined Radio Central’s programming. This diligent “writer” was enormously popular in Lima. Vargas Llosa claims that he was both amused and fascinated by the Bolivian scriptwriter, whom he found to be a truly picturesque character: he worked tirelessly, he had an extraordinary sense of professional responsibility, and he was very absorbed by his role as a writer and performer.48 It was back during this very period that Vargas Llosa was becoming involved with writing for the first time himself. He also fell in love with an aunt much his senior—as mentioned earlier—against his parents’ wishes. All of this—the self-styled Peruvian Balzac and Vargas Llosa’s tumultuous first romance—provides ample anecdotal material for melodrama. His semi-autobiographical recounting of his relationship with his Aunt Julia resulted in her publishing her own book in response.49 The novel’s wildest anecdotes, however, are the product of Vargas Llosa’s imagination. La tía Julia y el escribidor is a novel of one love story and numerous soap opera melodramas of intrigue, passion, violence, and similar material. The odd-numbered chapters tell the story of Marito: his apprenticeship as a writer and growing romance with his aunt. The even-numbered chapters are nine radio soap operas that appear in the text supposedly as Pedro Camacho has written them for broadcast. Vargas Llosa has explained his original plan for this novel as follows: he would narrate accurately some episodes from his own life, covering several months—the time during which he worked for Radio Panamericana, how he met his first wife, his marriage—and all that the whole thing meant in his personal experience; to alternate between these two stories was a little like presenting the front and back of reality, an objective part and a subjective part, a real face and a made-up one; he tried to do this in the novel, to alternate a chapter totally or almost totally imagined, with a chapter of personal history, authentic, documented. This is a description of the basic structure of the novel, even though, as Vargas Llosa admitted, the final version is quite different from what he had originally planned. The odd-numbered chapters are from the point of view of a firstperson narrator in retrospect. An adult tells his own story of late adolescence. At the beginning, “Marito” is studying law at the University of San Marcos, working at Radio Panamericana, and, above all, aspiring to be a writer. In the first chapter he (along with his family) meets the teasing Aunt Julia and the pompous scriptwriter at the radio station, who succinctly introduces himself as “Pedro Camacho: a Bolivian and an artist: a friend.”50

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The initial chapters provide an introductory characterization of each. The indefatigable Camacho appears as a caricature of a writer whose superficial production never discourages his utter seriousness of purpose. Social events with the family lead to Marito’s relationship with Julia: they celebrate an uncle’s birthday by going out to drink and dance, and on the way home Marito kisses her for the first time. At this stage in Marito’s development as a writer, literary creation is conceived mostly in terms of models. He is always planning on writing “in the manner of” renowned authors (Somerset Maugham, Maupassant, and others). As the odd-numbered chapters are developed, Camacho’s popularity grows in Lima, Marito experiments with different approaches to writing, and the secret love affair with Aunt Julia becomes more intense. Camacho loses control of his soap-opera factory, confusing characters among his numerous weekly productions. He eventually becomes insane and is hurried off to an asylum—only to appear at the very end of the novel as a listless and even more eccentric old man. Marito’s affair with Aunt Julia leads to their scandalous elopement to a small town. The even-numbered chapters of La tía Julia y el escribidor offer nine soap operas, written by Camacho, in which the most humorous element is their aesthetic failure. They are poorly written and usually in poor taste. The first of these stories (chapter 2) portrays a young woman, Elianita, who is to wed Red Antúnez. The evening they make nuptial vows, it becomes apparent that Elianita is four months pregnant—by Red’s brother, Richard. The melodrama ends with a series of melodramatic questions, such as “Would Red Antúnez desert his reckless, foolhardy spouse that very night?” (Aunt Julia, 39). All of Camacho’s soap operas tell such a story and end with similar melodramatic interrogations. They often feature characters, ranging from rapists to psychopathic murderers, who manifest sexual or psychological aberrations. The structure of alternating chapters gives a special ending to the novel. By chapters 17 and 19, Marito’s situation has become critical. Chapter 20, which the reader expects to be another of Camacho’s soap operas, is the final chapter of the affair Marito has had with his lover, Aunt Julia, and with his love, writing. In this manner, Vargas Llosa implies that Marito’s story has become just another soap opera. Despite the numerous suggestions along these lines, fundamental differences remain between Marito’s story and those of Camacho. La tía Julia y el escribidor begins with an epigraph from a novel by the Mexican novelist Salvador Elizondo: “I write. I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing and I can also see

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myself seeing that I am writing.” (Elizondo’s solipsistic observations continue for several more lines.) Such commentary reflects a common attitude of writers during the 1970s, both in Latin America and elsewhere. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter can be seen as part of a general trend toward a postmodern, self-conscious type fiction or, to use a term that the North American writer in vogue at the time popularized, a literature of exhaustion. This is Vargas Llosa’s novel about writing. Nevertheless, it has features that distinguish it from much metafiction. The dynamics of reading and writing in this novel make it more entertaining than much self-conscious fiction, which is often characterized as dry “writers’ writing.”51 La tía Julia y el escribidor is, in effect, ten stories: nine soap operas plus Marito’s story. This interest in storytelling is consistent with Vargas Llosa’s previous work and sets it apart from much of the “writing about writing” published in Latin America and elsewhere during the 1970s. Vargas Llosa’s humorous inventions of this decade set the stage for the movement toward a more traditional writing in his later work of the 1980s. «

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Vargas Llosa dedicated most of his time in the late 1970s to the research and reading necessary for his ambitious novel La guerra del fin del mundo. According to Vargas Llosa, this adventure novel in the style of Dumas had been “latent” in him since he began writing.52 He began the novel in 1977, immediately after completing La tía Julia y el escribidor. He traveled to Japan to give a lecture in April 1979, but after that trip his daily work was the manuscript for La guerra del fin del mundo. In July of that year, after two years of working on this novel, he traveled to Bahia, Brazil, to research information related to the religious fanatics in Canudos, in the northeastern region of Brazil, at the end of the nineteenth century. Before going to Brazil, he had read several accounts of an uprising in Canudos, readings that he took on with a “passionate” interest.53 This trip to northeastern Brazil proved to be quite valuable: before it he had been writing insecurely for two years, but this experience was both revealing and quite important, as will be discussed at length below.54 He found other materials for La guerra del fin del mundo in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where he spent a year researching and writing in the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institute.

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For his intellectual and political career overall, this period proved to be important not only for the progress he made on his epic novel (which he completed at the Wilson Center), but also for his political vision. At the Wilson Center, Vargas Llosa was in regular dialogue with the other fellows, each of whom researched and wrote according to their individual needs and schedules. Vargas Llosa had his office in the original old pink building of the Smithsonian; the staff brought the books to the researchers according to their requests, and the fellows had lunch together daily, sharing their research projects with their cohorts once a week. During this year Vargas Llosa discovered a key reading for his future political vision: The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. It was in this book that Vargas Llosa found the seeds for much of his liberal thinking of the 1980s and beyond. As far as his economic ideas are concerned, other authors that he began reading in the Wilson Center were Isaiah Berlin and Milton Friedman. From these texts Vargas Llosa began forging new political and economic ideas, distant from the Marxist and neoMarxist concepts that had been so important for him and his generation of Latin American intellectuals. This was the beginning of his transformation into what some of his critics have identified as a “neoliberal,” but Vargas Llosa has consistently insisted that he does not identify himself as a “neoliberal” but rather a classic liberal of the nineteenth-century tradition (see the epilogue). For Vargas Llosa, his stay at the Wilson Center was a period in which he concluded that economics was not really a science. Vargas Llosa considered the 1980–1981 academic year a good one. He and Patricia lived in a picturesque wooden home on Reservoir Road in the Georgetown section of Washington; from there, Mario could walk in the morning to the Smithsonian—an activity he had enjoyed since the days of his walks to the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid in the 1950s. In September 1980 José Miguel Oviedo invited Vargas Llosa to a symposium at Indiana University in which the Peruvian gave one of the three plenary lectures, along with Carlos Fuentes and Juan Goytisolo. After the stay in Washington, Vargas Llosa returned to Lima, where he directed a television program on cultural subjects, La Torre de Babel (The Tower of Babel Tower). He also published a play and saw it open in Lima and Buenos Aires under the title La señorita de Tacna (The missus from Tacna). The major event in the life of Vargas Llosa in 1981, however, was the publication of La guerra del fin del mundo. Its epic vision, storytelling genius, and fascinating characters are just three of several factors that make La guerra del fin del mundo the

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embodiment of Vargas Llosa’s twentieth-century writing career. Vargas Llosa retells the incredible story of an anti-government rebellion by a community of religious fanatics and the ensuing war between these fanatics and the equally fervent government soldiers. As is all too often the case with such seemingly “incredible” Latin American stories, the happenings in the Brazilian town of Canudos—mentioned briefly above— are based on actual historical events of the late 1890s. The setting and historical context provided anecdotal material for what is one of Vargas Llosa’s best novels. Many of his previous attitudes, themes, and narrative techniques are fully elaborated in La guerra del fin del mundo. Nevertheless, it is a more accessible novel than his previous work of epic proportions, Conversación en La Catedral. According to Vargas Llosa, he had never been so fascinated with a story as with that of Canudos.55 His fabrication on the topic in novelistic form is the result of both chance and labor, such as research in Lima, Bahia, and the Library of Congress. Chance came into play when a Brazilian film director asked him to write a filmscript for a movie using Canudos as a backdrop. Since the Peruvian knew nothing of the subject, he read the classic book in Brazilian literature, Rebellion in the Backlands (1902, Os Sertões) by Euclides da Cunha. He then spent several months writing the script—but the film was never made. Nevertheless, he decided to write the novel because in the history of Canudos one could see something, according to the author, that had been present in Latin American history over the course of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries: the total lack of communication between two sectors of society.56 The initial response among critics and readers to this “adventure story,” as the author himself has called it, was uniformly enthusiastic. One of Latin America’s most respected critics at the time, Ángel Rama, judged La guerra del fin del mundo a masterpiece that future generations would consider a key Latin American novel of the second half of the twentieth century.57 It became an immediate best seller in the Hispanic world, and remained so for over a year. The French translation was a bestseller in France. When it appeared in English, two years after Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter had popularized Vargas Llosa’s name among North American readers, a reviewer for the New York Times called it a “powerful and haunting” novel, and the New York Times Book Review singled it out as one of the twelve best books of the year.58 Another review of The War of the End of the World proclaimed Vargas Llosa one of the “world’s best writers.”59 The general consensus among the book re-

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viewers and initial scholarly articles in the early 1980s was that this was one of the most outstanding novels by one of Latin America’s most accomplished writers. The anecdotal material for La guerra del fin del mundo, then, came from a historical book, the Brazilian text titled Rebellion in the Backlands. Vargas Llosa had long maintained that the novelist and the historian are closely allied: “Rescuer and verbal gravedigger of an epoch, the great novelist is a kind of vulture: the putrefied flesh of history is his favorite nourishment and has served to inspire him to his most audacious undertakings.”60 In this case, Vargas Llosa, the “verbal gravedigger,” made use of this unusual text to unravel that “putrid flesh of history.” Rebellion in the Backlands is an unorthodox combination of imaginative fiction, documentary history, and sundry essays. After having worked several years as a journalist, da  Cunha was sent to the town of Canudos in 1896 to cover the uprising for a newspaper known as Estado do São Paulo. Five years after the fall of Canudos, da Cunha’s magnum opus of more than five hundred pages appeared, in 1902. It should not be surprising that Vargas Llosa was so impressed by this work: it has been considered by some critics to be Brazil’s greatest book, and by many Brazilians as a “Bible of Brazilian nationality.” To place Canudos in a general historical context: Brazil’s people gained independence in 1899 when Dom Pedro II and the empire were overthrown. The ruling oligarchy in Brazil (a parallel group, historically, with the old oligarchy in Peru and elsewhere in Latin America) had already been challenged in 1888, when slavery was abolished. Forging a unified Brazil was a vital problem of the subsequent period. Regional, political, and economic conflicts undermined stability, and, before Canudos, there had already been a counterrevolutionary revolt in 1893–1894 that had threatened the nascent and fragile republic. The general setting of Vargas Llosa’s novel was, therefore, rural northeastern Brazil, the town of Canudos and surrounding villages, the city of Bahia, and a weak new nation. The original Spanish edition of La guerra del fin del mundo featured a full-page reproduction of a painting of Canudos: the simple portrait shows an idyllic village with three large buildings (one of which is a church), a small cemetery (with twelve crosses), and a hundred or so little huts. Da Cunha had offered the following description: “Canudos, an old cattle ranch on the banks of VasaBarris [river] was in 1890 a backwoods hamlet of around five-hundred mud-thatched wooden shanties.”61 The background to the conflict was the arrival in Canudos in 1893 of

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a bizarre individual named Antônio Conselheiro; his life and personality were in themselves material for a novel. He had spent years wandering through the backlands regions as a type of roving missionary—giving sermons and advice to the poor, living parsimoniously, and helping to repair local churches and cemeteries. With time, he became a popular legend, indeed a Christlike figure. Once he was settled in Canudos, his following grew rapidly; the town’s expanded population was a motley crowd of the poor and outcast, including some of the region’s most feared criminals. All were or became fanatic religious followers of Conselheiro. (In the translation into English of The War of the End of the World the narrator calls him “Antonio the Counselor,” although some characters refer to him as “Antonio Conselheiro.”) His followers, the Jagunços of Canudos, were soon faced with defending Canudos against four major attacks by government soldiers. The fervent peasants soundly defeated the government’s first contingent of one hundred. After the Jagunços viciously destroyed the second army of five hundred, the war in Canudos became an event of national significance for this struggling nation. Consequently, the successful, and even renowned, colonel Antônio Moreira César, with some twelve hundred soldiers, was sent to Canudos. The confident Moreira César, along with many of his soldiers, was brutally massacred. In an extended final battle, more than three thousand national troops, supported by heavy artillery, razed Canudos and killed its one thousand inhabitants. Rebellion in the Backlands possesses several features that would logically appeal to a writer like Vargas Llosa, if not openly “seduce” (to use his literary language) him. Since at least 1958 (as he read Spanish and Catalonian novels of chivalry), he has been fascinated with the idea of the “total novel,” to which many novelists aspire (see part III). What seems to have attracted Vargas Llosa most, however, was its aspect of adventure story. He has written of his attraction to the adventures of the novel of chivalry—above all, Tirant lo Blanc—and to such writers as Jules Verne and Dumas. Rebellion in the Backlands, particularly in the final chapters, contains much of the human drama and sanguine violence that is omnipresent in the novel of chivalry in general and Tirant lo Blanc in particular. The original Spanish edition of La guerra del fin del mundo includes a full-page reproduction of a painting of “The Fanatic Antônio Conselheiro”—a kind of tribute to the “priest” and da Cunha’s popularization of him. Both the Spanish and English editions of La guerra del fin

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del mundo contain a dedication “To Euclides da Cunha.” These are Vargas Llosa’s only direct references to da Cunha in the entire novel. With this dedication, Vargas Llosa makes an interesting change in focus: if his first five books are inevitably redolent of foreign writers (Flaubert and Faulkner), La guerra del fin del mundo grows not only from these two writers, but from a Brazilian. The plot does not engage the reader in the intricacies and complexities of multidimensional time or the juxtaposition of planes of reality, such as are found in the first three novels. Rather, La guerra del fin del mundo overwhelms with the cumulative effect of seemingly endless detail and the intensity of human drama. In this sense, it falls within the tradition of the canonical novelists of the nineteenth century, whom Vargas Llosa admires above all, Tolstoy, as well as the novel of chivalry. La guerra del fin del mundo consists of four parts, each of which contains between three and seven chapters. Most chapters contain four or five brief narrative segments, usually three to eight pages in length. Part I (120 pages) has seven chapters, each with four narrative segments. Part II (only 11 pages) contains only three brief chapters, with no divisions into narrative segments. Part III (209 pages) offers seven chapters, each with five narrative segments. Part IV (215 pages) contains six chapters, each with four narrative segments. Although this introductory description may make the book appear similar in organization to La casa verde or Conversación en La Catedral, the novels are comparable in only the most superficial way: unlike the technically complex Faulknerian novels of the 1960s, La guerra del fin del mundo is basically straightforward narration related, for the most part, by a controlling omniscient voice. In this sense it was Vargas Llosa’s most traditional novel when it appeared in 1981. Part I of La guerra del fin del mundo provides an introduction to most of the main characters, and to the general historical and political setting. By the end of part I, the people of Canudos have stunned the government’s soldiers by defeating the first two armies sent to the backlands to place the rebellious fanatics under control. The major characters introduced in part I are Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel (always called “the Counselor”), Galileo Gall, and Epaminondas Goncalves. The narrator presents the Counselor as a special and extraordinary individual, portraying him as a living legend and, by the end of part I, a Jesus-type figure. In addition to descriptions of a panoply of characters in part I, this portion of the book includes a government version of the situation:

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one narrative segment provides the account of the military officer Pires Ferreira’s defeat in Canudos. Following the introduction of the characters and the intensity of the military action in part I—involving the two clashes between the inhabitants of Canudos and government soldiers—part II functions as a brief interlude. The reader is afforded the opportunity to distance himself from Canudos and view the situation as it is seen through the press in Bahia (Salvador): an editorial from the Jornal de Notícias dated January 3, 1897, appears in its entirety. This text accuses the aristocratic and conservative forces in Brazil of having collaborated with the English in fomenting the rebellion in Canudos. Conversations between a newspaper employee identified only as a “nearsighted journalist” and Goncalves precede and follow this editorial prepared by the myopic journalist. Part III of the novel, like the third act of a traditional four-act play, complicates the plot and intensifies the human drama. Two characters who will have an enormous impact appear on the scene: Colonel Moreira César and the Baron of Canabrava. Moreira César arrives at the rural town of Queimadas as a hero of the Brazilian republic. Neither he nor the citizens of the republic have the slightest doubt that he will save it from the fanatics in the north. Much of part III involves the slow advancement of his troops upon Canudos and their positioning for battle. From the point of view of the Baron of Canabrava, whom the reader observes discussing politics with Adalberto de Gumúcio, the military represents a threat to the power of the landed aristocracy (latifundistas): a military victory in Canudos could precipitate a sweep into power. Part IV is dedicated almost entirely to the final siege of Canudos, which eventually destroys the Jagunços and all remnants of the town. The first three chapters describe the preparations for the siege and the beginnings of the battle. The last three chapters, functioning as a type of epilogue, relate, after the fact, what has happened in Canudos. Even this brief plot résumé suggests several ways in which Vargas Llosa used da  Cunha to tell the story of Canudos. The two most outstanding parallels are the characterization of the Counselor and of Colonel Moreira César. Vargas Llosa re-creates the two persons described by da Cunha, changing certain details and allowing his imagination to invent others. For example, the purple tunic that drapes over the Counselor in Rebellion in the Backlands becomes a blue one in La guerra del fin del mundo. Some of da Cunha’s dates and facts also filter into Vargas Llosa’s text: the 5,200 dwellings from da Cunha’s documentation become a similar 5,783 in La guerra del fin del mundo. Though the numbers

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are not identical, they respond to a similar impulse toward documentation. Other direct comparisons between the two texts can be, and have been, made.62 Vargas Llosa’s lifetime allegiance to Borges, who seems like such a different writer, can be seen here: exercising the right of invention is what Vargas Llosa learned from Borges, and in La guerra del fin del mundo he exercises this right freely. The most compelling relationship between the two books, however, is not to be found by comparing dwellings and such as they appear in Canudos. Rather, the general pattern is more interesting than the specific details in making comparisons: da Cunha was an indefatigable researcher and Brazilian nationalist who seemingly attempted to write the “total” Brazilian book; Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, both attempts to resist the totalizing impulse and succumbs to it with his vast material. Da Cunha relates a plethora of facts and situations, but his book acquires the drama of a story only at the end; Vargas Llosa limits himself more to telling numerous stories which, interwoven and experienced in their totality, are still overwhelmingly powerful human drama. In this sense the Peruvian writer has selectively transformed a massive human circumstance into a more complete and more wholly human story. The nearsighted journalist in La guerra del fin del mundo, always awkward and inadequate, seems to play the role of da Cunha the journalist: he haphazardly gets the information but, in reality, fails to tell the story. As in Vargas Llosa’s novels of the 1960s and 1970s, plot in itself is once again a predominant factor. The challenging element for the reader of this novel is the density and length of the story, rather than intercalated dialogues or complex relationships between fictional readers and writers. Narrative technique is not in itself such an explicit issue, and the effects of Vargas Llosa’s techniques are more subtle than in his more overtly Faulknerian texts. Some of Vargas Llosa’s constant thematic concerns reappear in La guerra del fin del mundo. The fanaticism that emanates from both Canudos and some Republicans has traces of the attitudes of a Pantaleón Pantoja or a Pedro Camacho. Once again, Vargas Llosa exploits the humorous potential of fanaticism, although the experience of this novel is predominantly tragic rather than comic. The novelist places in question the potential of the purely rational in comprehending empirical reality. Rather than questioning this reality by undermining it, as in La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral, in La guerra del fin del mundo the rational is called into question by means of the characterization of Galileo Gall, who is one of the most intellectual and rational individu-

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als, as well as one of the most flagrant fools, of the novel. The presence of the military and its paternal authority figures, most evident before in La ciudad y los perros and Pantaleón y las visitadoras, is once again ushered forth as a central preoccupation. The fanaticism, rigidity, and stupidity of these authority and military figures in this novel make them victims, once again, of Vargas Llosa’s critical and occasionally satirical pen. (Again, the father figure reappears as the ongoing “demon,” or trauma.) Like La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, and Conversación en La Catedral, La guerra del fin del mundo develops characters who function as part of a vast network of human relationships. The novel abounds in characters, and they all eventually not only relate to the whole, but survive or die as part of this network. Several characters gain their humanity by means of their relationship with the Counselor. They also perish as part of a human grouping that has been bonded by the Counselor’s story. As in the novels of the 1960s and 1970s, characters seem to relate to each other in ways that are sometimes surprisingly coincidental. These paradoxes reaffirm Vargas Llosa’s vision of how individual acts affect the whole, and vice versa. Fanaticism is one factor that motivates characters in La guerra del fin del mundo, although it is not the predominant one. By dealing with fanaticism Vargas Llosa has continued to explore a facet of human behavior fictionalized in the character of Father García of La casa verde, Captain Pantoja of Pantaleón y las visitadoras, and Pedro Camacho of La tía Julia y el escribidor. He brings fanatic attitudes to the realm of contemporary politics in a later novel, Historia de Mayta, and to the realm of nineteenth-century politics in the twenty-first-century work El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003, The Way to Paradise). «

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In 1983 the president of Peru, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, invited Vargas Llosa to take a lead role in the investigation, as part of an appointed commission, of a national disaster in rural Peru: eight journalists had been assassinated in the town of Uchuraccay. By now the Shining Path guerrilla group was active in rural Peru, and there were abundant, and conflicting, rumors and theories about exactly how the journalists had died. The region had been through a period of tensions and occasional direct conflicts between the local indigenous people and the Shining Path. Vargas Llosa accepted the president’s invitation, traveled to Uchu-

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raccay with the commission, and interviewed the people residing in and around the town at the time of the assassinations. The commission reached the conclusion that the local villagers in Huaychao had killed the journalists by mistake, believing that they were members of Shining Path. Once the commission’s findings were published, the polemics immediately began; some individuals and groups in Peru claimed that the report was a defense of the government and its policies regarding both indigenous groups and the Shining Path. Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, published letters sent from several countries, giving his assurances that the commission’s report was written with complete independence from the government. Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa’s report on Uchuraccay has remained a matter of discussions—and critiques of Vargas Llosa himself—well into the twenty-first century. The massacre had been fully exposed to international scrutiny when Vargas Llosa himself published an article in Peru’s Oiga, which ran later, in translation, in the New York Times Magazine.63 In the 1980s, Vargas Llosa returned to one of his lifetime interests, which had begun in his early adolescence—theater. Indeed, one of his early adolescent, pre-professional creations had been a play, La huida del Inca, performed when he was in high school. His professional career as a playwright in the 1980s began with La señorita de Tacna, which premiered in the theater capital of Latin America, Buenos Aires, in May 1981. Later it was presented in Chile, Uruguay, Spain, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Madrid. He followed this in 1983 with Kathie y el hipopótamo (Kathie and the hippopotamus), which also has had numerous performances since its premier in Caracas in April 1983. In 1986 he came forth with the play La Chunga. La señorita de Tacna is a two-act play dealing on the surface with aging, the family, pride, and individual destiny. It also confronts a more comprehensive topic that begins appearing with some regularity in the 1980s: how and why stories are born. In Vargas Llosa’s prefatory remarks to this play he asks the question: Why do humans need to tell stories? This question reappears in the novel El hablador and other later fiction. The principal characters in this play are an aged spinster named Mamaé and her great-nephew, Belisario, a writer in his forties or fifties. The physical set is fundamental to the plot: a division of the stage into two halves provides the performance space for the two main story lines. On one side is the modest middle-class apartment of Mamaé’s grandparents, located in Lima in the 1950s. The other half of the stage is Belisario’s study, located “anywhere in the world in the year 1980.” Belisario’s set-

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ting is simple and realistic: it is a typical little study before the computer age, with a desk, lots of papers, and a typewriter. The other setting, however, is unrealistic because it exists as Belisario’s memory and changes to other places and time periods: the home where Grandmother and Mamaé lived as children in Tacna (a town in the extreme south of Peru), another in Arequipa (Vargas Llosa’s birthplace), and a house in Bolivia (where Vargas Llosa lived the first eight years of his childhood). Belisario remembers anecdotes from the family’s life, and occasionally interacts with characters from the other half of the stage. These anecdotes relate stories of Mamaé’s failed marriage with a Chilean military officer, the proud family’s growing economic difficulties, and, finally, Mamaé’s death. Kathie y el hipopótamo is another two-act play related to the act of storytelling. The stories and characters are in constant transformation, making any attempted résumé of the plot a questionable undertaking. The two main characters, Kathie Kennety and Santiago Zavala (from Conversación en La Catedral), are accompanied by Ana de Zavala (Santiago’s wife) and Juan, who play out roles according to situations created by Kathie and Santiago. The entire story takes place in Kathie’s buhardilla de París (always in quotation marks in the text; her “Parisian apartment” is located in Lima). The scenes of the play are remembered or invented by Kathie and Santiago. These two plays were reasonably well received on their merits in much of the Hispanic world. Within the body of Vargas Llosa’s total work, however, they are less substantive than his novels and of primary interest largely within the context of his fiction or as light entertainment. Even a passing glance at the plays will discern characters and situations from the novels: Santiago Zavala from Conversación en La Catedral, Pedro Camacho from La tía Julia y el escribidor, journalists, writers, and many of the frustrations and failures of Peruvian life suffered by characters from La ciudad y los perros to La guerra del fin del mundo. Beyond these obvious points of contact, there are more significant confluences of Vargas Llosa’s fiction and theater of the 1980s. Most of Vargas Llosa’s fiction contains elements of theater. Mention has been made of the development of conflict in Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La guerra del fin del mundo as in a traditional play. Four of Vargas Llosa’s early novels—La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral, and Pantaleón y las visitadoras—are highly dialogic. Conversación en La Catedral represented, in the late 1960s, Vargas Llosa’s most elaborate fabrication of a novel of dialogue, while Pantaleón y las

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visitadoras in fact contains only a few narrative segments that are not dialogue. Given his preference for using direct dialogue to narrate a story, it is hardly surprising that Vargas Llosa would ultimately turn to the artistic form of pure dialogue, theater. Vargas Llosa has discussed the “total novel” in his essays, and has written works such as Conversación en La Catedral and La guerra del fin del mundo that seemingly aspire to such grandiose comprehensiveness. He explains in his introductory remarks to Kathie y el hipopótamo that the totalizing impulse was a factor for him in this play: “Perhaps it isn’t necessary to say that in this farce I have attempted, as in my novels, to attain an illusion of totality.” «

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Between 1983 and 1987 Vargas Llosa continued his intense itinerary of travel for invited lectures and for research related to his future novel projects. During this period he published three novels: Historia de Mayta, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, and El hablador. These are very different novels that originated from different periods of the author’s life. Historia de Mayta was born in Paris in 1962 when Vargas Llosa read in Le Monde about the first case of an armed and violent insurrection in Peru; this came to serve as the point of departure for the novel. This work can be seen as a reaction to political violence that began in 1962 and culminated in the massacre of eight journalists in 1983. By the 1980s, Vargas Llosa had become deeply affected by Peru’s recent history of violence: “This is what I wanted, at least in my novel, to be clear: that violence at a certain point lacks ideology.”64 The key event in Historia de Mayta takes place in Jauja, the town about which Vargas Llosa had read in Le Monde in 1962. An armed rebellion in this Andean village in 1958 had failed in its goal to overthrow the government. In fact, it was a disorganized and ill-conceived local uprising in which the majority of the participants were high school students; an aged Trotskyite and an impulsive young idealist had orchestrated the event. Soon after the publication of the novel, a Peruvian magazine published an article about the person on whom Vargas Llosa’s character Mayta is principally based: Jacinto Rentería.65 According to this article, Rentería was the Trotskyite in the Jauja uprising. Historia de Mayta is a ten-chapter novel that features Mayta and a novelist as its main characters. The novelist, who appears to be a Mario Vargas Llosa figure but is never named, is the narrator within the story.

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The narrator-novelist relates, in the present tense, conditions in Peru and his efforts to reconstruct Mayta’s story. He attempts to carry out this task by soliciting and listening to the testimonies of persons who had known Mayta under various circumstances. Each chapter features, primarily, one person’s version of Mayta’s life; the last chapter is an encounter between the novelist and Mayta. Those whom the novelist seeks out include his ex-girlfriend, Jauja’s eminent Marxist professor, a leftist Peruvian senator, and several political collaborators. As might be expected, many of their anecdotes and ideas about Mayta are contradictory. Some portray him as revolutionary and ideologically well founded; others describe an emotional young man unable to define a political position and who even worked with the CIA. While most believe he was the organizer of the Jauja disaster, some describe his participation in Jauja as marginal. His ex-girlfriend affirms that Mayta is homosexual; Mayta disclaims this to the narrator-novelist. Even though it is to be expected that different persons would present varying points of view on Mayta, at the conclusion of the novel he is seen simply as a contradictory and confused individual who failed to gain whatever political objectives he might have had. The contemporary (1980s) Peru of the narrator-novelist’s “present” is a poor and strife-ridden nation seemingly headed toward absolute chaos. The narrator-novelist occasionally muses on the situation, and cannot avoid noticing his surroundings as he moves from witness to witness. In one scene, he briefly observes the working poor, whose modest and monotonous lives are illustrative of good fortune when compared to the unemployed and destitute street people of Lima. According to the senator, the social and political deterioration in Peru has reached new extremes. The general malaise and violent rural situation indicate a nation on the verge of collapse. When Vargas Llosa was a child living in Bolivia, he imagined a fictional Peru populated by heroic Incas. Four decades later, he invented a vastly different country, but still presented a basically fictional and literary nation. It is literary not because its people are culturally sophisticated but rather because its reality is communicated and understood in a literary fashion. Since the circumstances are so strange, Peruvian life becomes literary. There are several allusions in the text to Peru as a fictional entity. The narrator also remarks that his goal is not to write a “true history” but to use multiple and contradictory versions of Mayta’s life to fabricate a story. On several occasions during the 1980s Vargas Llosa explained his

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ambiguous relationship with Peru, describing how the nation had been a “passion” and “disease” for him; a phenomenon with the emotion and nuances of a love/hate relationship. After a hiatus of over a decade— marked by excursions into humor and into nineteenth-century Brazil—Vargas Llosa returns to his passion by making Peru itself the central topic of Historia de Mayta. «

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In November 1983 Vargas Llosa visited Washington University in St. Louis with an invitation to enter into dialogue with three audiences: he gave a public lecture in English to the campus community and public at large; he visited the faculty and graduate students in Spanish for a discussion in Spanish about his work; and he visited the faculty and graduate students in French for a discussion in French about his relationship with French writers. Given Vargas Llosa’s known interest in “literary fetishism,” a key component of the invitation was a visit to Hannibal, Missouri, along the Mississippi River, to see the Mark Twain home and museum. In his essays, Vargas Llosa has written of his activities as a literary fetishist: when living in Paris in the 1960s he took every opportunity to visit the homes of French writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, and Rousseau. In Hannibal, Vargas Llosa leafed through first editions of Twain’s work and was fascinated by the objects that were part of Twain’s everyday life. In 1984 and 1985 Vargas Llosa continued his busy schedule on the lecture circuit, with trips from Lima to Paris, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, and elsewhere. In April 1986 he accepted a second invitation to Washington University in St. Louis, where he arrived with Patricia for a month’s visit. He followed his lifetime routine of writing in the morning, with an interruption early in the morning for a jog, which was his frequent physical activity in the 1980s and 1990s. This time, his practice of literary fetishism involved a trip to Oxford, Mississippi, where he visited the Faulkner tomb in Oxford and the Faulkner collection in the library of the University of Mississippi, as well as Rowan Oak, the Faulkner home and museum. He left flowers at Faulkner’s tomb. Vargas Llosa published his eighth novel, his nod to detective fiction, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, in 1986. Sargent Lituma of La casa verde reappears in this brief entertainment—the third of six of these light works—which takes place in the 1950s. Lituma and his sidekick Silva pursue the assassin of Palomino Molero, a young soldier in love

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with a young woman named Alicia Mindrau. While they interview persons who knew the young lovers, Silva has fantasies of a sexual encounter with a woman of seemingly little physical attraction, doña Adriana. Just as Lituma and Silva piece together an idea of the potential killer, so does the reader. In the sixth chapter, Alicia Mindrau confesses that she had been the lover of the deceased, and it appears that her father, Colonel Mindrau, is the culprit. After Colonel Mindrau commits suicide, his guilt seems confirmed. In the last chapter, however, the issue of the guilty party is not resolved, and the locals continue believing, as they have all along, that some “peces gordos” (big fish) are the culprits. The principle interest of the story is not actually to determine the identity of the criminals, but to reveal prejudices that lead to several deaths. «

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After their stay in St. Louis that April, Mario and Patricia traveled to London, where they were planning, in principle, to reestablish a permanent residence. In July 1987, nevertheless, they left London for Peru to vacation on the beaches of northern Peru in Punta Sal, where they heard the stunning and upsetting news that President Alan García had declared the nationalization of all the banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions. Just two days into his vacation, relaxation abandoned the Peruvian public intellectual, who immediately published an article about “totalitarian Peru,” which appeared in the widely read newspaper El Comercio on August 2, 1987. In this article Vargas Llosa opposed the presidential decision, encouraging Peruvians to exhaust all legal means to oppose García’s measures, if they wanted democracy to survive in Peru. Vargas Llosa did not remain in Peru, but returned to London in October and made Great Britain his primary residence until early 1988. The novel El hablador, marking Vargas Llosa’s return to the Peruvian jungle, appeared in 1987. It is also his return to matters set forth in the play Kathie y el hipopótamo concerning storytelling. As alluded to above, the act of storytelling in itself has fascinated Vargas Llosa from the early days, when he first discovered that seemingly irrational and unplanned factors played an important role in his creative process. Is there something deeply human in the need to tell stories? What are the functions of storytelling for the individual and for society at large? These and related questions are addressed in this novel and in other writings of the 1980s. When he began writing El hablador in 1985, Vargas Llosa had al-

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ready explored various traditional forms of storytelling: the grand tradition of the novel of chivalry (which he had discovered in Madrid in 1958 and about which he had written essays in the late 1960s and early 1970s), the nineteenth-century European novel (with his book-length essay on Flaubert), and the techniques of major modernists of the twentieth century, beginning with Faulkner. Vargas Llosa’s fascination with story telling, however, has not been limited to the most complex forms of high literary culture. In La tía Julia y el escribidor, for example, Vargas Llosa had explored one of the most mundane forms of storytelling, the soap opera. With El hablador, Vargas Llosa returns to the Peruvian Amazon to consider one of the most ancient forms of storytelling, the oral tradition. The critical reception of El hablador has been generally positive, and academic studies of this novel have focused on the use of oral tradition, the representation of indigenous peoples, biographical elements, and intertextuality. In the opinion of Sara Castro-Klarén, Vargas Llosa attains a successful representation of the Machiguenga masculine subject, as well as a continuation of the autobiographical trend in his fiction.66 With El hablador, Vargas Llosa embarks on one of his most risky narrative adventures as a writer by attempting to incorporate into a written text the oral tradition of indigenous people (the Machiguengas). This project involves adventure and risk because it is relatively rare in the second half of the twentieth century for a novelist to attempt to tell stories from the perspective of the contador or hablador, i.e., the oral storyteller. In this sense, the creation of this novel was the biggest risk Vargas Llosa had taken since deciding to temporarily abandon his “total novel” projects and explore humor with Pantaleón y las visitadoras. In addition to the adventure and risk involved with this novel, it also represents a certain continuity in his writing, in at least two senses. On the one hand, Vargas Llosa returns to one of his favorite devices: the use of the “communicating vessels” (vasos comunicantes) in which the narrative moves back and forth between the voice of the principal narrator and the voice of the storyteller (hablador). On the other hand, the presence of oral culture is an exploration of an interest evident, in a minor way, in the previous novels La casa verde and La guerra del fin del mundo. In El hablador, the principal narrator, “Mario-narrator,” is a character—similar in some ways to the author Mario Vargas Llosa—who writes from Florence, Italy, about his experience of discovering some photographs there that remind him of some of his experiences in the Ama-

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zon jungle. This “Mario-narrator” narrates chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8—five of the novel’s eight chapters. “Mario-narrator” is fascinated with everything related to oral storytelling, an interest that begins when he makes his first trip to the Amazon and hears about habladores (storytellers) among the Machiguengas and culminates in his discovery of a character named Saúl Zuratas, who is an oral storyteller in the jungle. The remaining chapters—3, 5, 7—are narrated by an hablador who is a member of the Machiguenga tribe. Near the end of the novel the reader realizes that this storyteller is, in fact, a Caucasian person who has become assimilated into the indigenous community. This person turns out to be Saúl Zuratas, a Peruvian of Jewish descent who had appeared in the chapters narrated by “Mario-narrator.” In chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8, then, Saúl appears as a person marginalized by society in Lima because of a physical defect: an enormous lunar (birthmark) that covers half of his face. In chapters 3, 5, and 7 he is a convincing oral storyteller of indigenous tales and is identified as an hablador. Consequently, this is a novel about acculturation, but the story is the opposite of the conventional story of acculturation. The interest in popular forms of storytelling is just one of the several parallels with La tía Julia y el escribidor. In the latter, Vargas Llosa develops the story of a writer of soap operas who is an obsessive creator of fictions. He is an interesting character precisely because of his obsession. In El hablador, the parallel character is Saúl Zuritas, a person who is as obsessed with indigenous culture as Pedro Camacho is with his soap operas. The reader’s surprise in this novel is to discover that the supposed Machiguenga storyteller (hablador) is not a Machiguenga at all. Vargas Llosa leaves clues early in the novel that this might be the case. The most noteworthy aspect of El hablador, however, is neither this surprise nor Vargas Llosa’s interest in indigenous cultures, an interest he shares with José María Arguedas, Rosario Castellanos, and a plethora of other Latin American writers. Rather, the unique aspect of El hablador is the interaction between the two story lines, between oral culture and writing culture. Saúl’s process of apprenticeship (his learning how to tell stories) is a mirror image of the same process learned by the “Mario-narrator” figure, the Peruvian in Florence who, in Europe, learns how to tell modern stories in the European manner. In the end, both storytellers are successful: Saúl assimilates so successfully that he becomes an hablador (storyteller); the “Mario-narrator” becomes so interested in European culture that he becomes a Peruvian novelist.

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In early 1988, a few months after his public criticism of President Alan García, Vargas Llosa and Patricia returned to Lima. His life became intensely political for the next three years, including his announcing his candidacy for the presidency of Peru in June 1989. At different stages of his life he had lived the Peruvian social and political situation intensely, particularly during his years in the Leoncio Prado military school, and in the early 1950s when he worked as a journalist. From July 1987, when he wrote his open letter to Alan García, to June 1990, Vargas Llosa made Peruvian political life his primary focus. During this period, he founded the Movimiento Libertad, he participated in the Frente Democrático, and he was active in his presidential campaign. During these three years he read and wrote relatively little, although he had signed a contract to write brief introductions for a Spanish publishing company as prefaces to classics of Western literature. (Later, these essays appeared together in a book titled La verdad de las mentiras [The truth of lies].) He also read classical poetry of the Spanish seventeenth-century Golden Age as a literary discipline. The political and economic situation in Peru had been deteriorating during the 1970s and 1980s. In October 1968, the military, under the leadership of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, carried out a coup d’état against President Fernando Belaúnde Terry. They installed a military government from 1968 to 1975, with the goal of opening Peruvian society to the working people. With a better-educated leadership than most military governments in Latin America, it made gestures toward muchneeded agrarian reform and redistribution of wealth. The military government also nationalized much of the industrial sector and mining. It eventually imposed different forms of censorship of the press, however, leading Vargas Llosa to send an open letter of protest to Velasco Alvarado. Years later, in the late 1980s, Vargas Llosa’s political program for Peru was the opposite of the strong state power and economic intervention of this military regime. Amid the chaos of the final year of Velasco Alvarado’s regime, General Francisco Morales Bermúdez assumed control of the government in August. His government (1975–1980), as well as those of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980–1985) and Alan García (1985–1990), was inefficient and unsuccessful in confronting the nation’s growing political and economic crises. Alan García and the APRA took over in 1985 with 53 percent of the popular vote, but with 90 percent of the population support-

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ing García’s measures during the first year of his government. By the end of 1986, Peru’s economy was growing at a rate of 8.6 percent, the highest in Latin America. Nevertheless, by the end of his five-year presidency, Peru was in one of its worse crisis periods: in 1990 Alan García had the support of only 10 percent of the population and an inflation rate of 20,000 percent. Complicating things even more was the situation with armed guerrilla movements. The initial guerrilla movements of the 1960s, inspired by Che Guevara, had been weak and disorganized in Peru. Hugo Blanco and Javier Heraud (about whom Vargas Llosa wrote brief articles in the 1960s) had organized small guerrilla groups in the mountains. Soon after their training in Cuba, however, these leaders were imprisoned and not liberated until 1970. By June 1965, Luis de la Puente Uceda had begun the guerrilla movement identified as MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario) in rural parts of the departments of Cuzco and Junín. The roots of the Shining Path (Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario por el Sendero Luminoso de Mariátegui) go back to 1970, when Abimael Guzmán, a professor of philosophy in Ayacucho, founded this movement. He remained the intellectual and political leader of the group until his arrest in 1992. From 1970 to 1977 the Shining Path was a relatively invisible political group that dedicated itself primarily to education. Drawing upon ideas from Mariátegui and Mao, the Shining Path used ideas from socialism as well as the defense of the rights of indigenous peoples. By the mid-1970s, the Shining Path had expanded its following and regional activity in Peru, recruiting the rural poor and the economically marginalized in urban areas. The Shining Path began its “popular war” (or “peoples’ war”) against the Peruvian state on May 17, 1980, with a series of violent attacks on the eve of the first democratic elections in more than a decade. On March 2, 1982, they attacked a prison in Ayacucho, freeing fift y-four of their followers. By 1983 the Shining Path’s violent attacks against the state and its economic infrastructure had increased, and did not come to an end until the mid-1990s. From 1985 to the early 1990s, the Shining Path controlled most of the valley of Huallaga, collaborating in this region with Colombian drug traffickers. By the mid1980s, the Shining Path had a presence in all regions of Peru. During this period, the guerrilla group also carried out a series of assassinations of government officials and leaders of the APRA. By the end of the 1980s, they were supporting several minority political parties as legal arms of the Shining Path. The Shining Path clearly represented a considerably

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strong political force in Peru by the end of the 1980s. Indeed, the immediate future of Peru appeared to be grim. This was the complex and difficult political and economic scenario which Vargas Llosa entered on August 21, 1987, when he joined the political arena as an active participant rather than the distant critic he had always been. His most prominent political act prior to writing his public letter to Alan García had been his revolutionary acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Caracas in 1967 and his prologue for Hernando Soto’s polemical book El otro sendero (The other path), which had appeared in print in August 1986. In this prologue, Vargas Llosa uses a new political discourse based on his readings in the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, of Hayek, Friedman, and their cohorts. In his new, exclusively political discourse, he presents Soto’s study of the “informal economy,” or what in some countries is called a “marginal” or “black” market. For Vargas Llosa, Soto’s book represents an effort to create a concrete, practical economic proposal, rather than one that Vargas Llosa considers too abstract and too typical of the abstract foolishness of what often passes as economic writing in Latin America. Vargas Llosa’s central idea (as well as Soto’s) is that in the recent history of Peru, the state has been more of an interference (“estorbo” in the original Spanish) than a stimulus for the economy, thus encouraging many, particularly among the less privileged, to seek refuge in the “informal economy” (i.e., black market). Vargas Llosa and Soto claim that it is virtually impossible to legalize a new business in Peru, given the complexity and slowness of the state bureaucracy, without a bribe or long wait. For Vargas Llosa, the bureaucratic and regulatory Peru is a caricature of the state in Latin America. Instead of being a democratic state, Peru is a discriminating and elitist nation that manipulates minorities— entities that it considers insignificant—to its advantage. Vargas Llosa claims that the state should not only redistribute the resources, but produce wealth. His prologue also contains something of Vargas-Llosa-thenovelist—the opening sentences suggest that sometimes economists tell better stories than novelists. Despite these literary touches to his essay, it is noteworthy that by 1986 Vargas Llosa had published an essay with a strictly political and economic focus, offering a new political alternative for Peru. Although this essay might well represent Vargas Llosa’s unconscious entrance into the Peruvian political arena, his first visible public political act took place on August 21, 1987, in downtown Lima, at the Plaza

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San Martín. President García’s announcement of his plan to nationalize the banking industry in Peru was the most recent of several measures that, according to Vargas Llosa, were destined to subvert democracy and the economy of Peru. Consequently, the author accepted an invitation to participate in the public demonstration on August 21. Surprisingly, some one hundred thousand supporters appeared at this public event to hear Vargas Llosa’s words. The centerpiece for his speech was a national call for a remaking of Peruvian institutions in the interest of “liberty” (libertad), a key word in Vargas Llosa’s political program in Peru and political thinking in general since the mid-1980s. Reflecting on this political event, Vargas Llosa’s son Álvaro, who was there, stated three years later: “Yo sentía que estábamos en campaña” (“I felt we were in a campaign”).67 He then continued his campaign against the nationalization of the banking industry, giving speeches in Arequipa and Piura, thus gathering a national visibility to his cause. Vargas Llosa returned to London in late 1987, where he dedicated himself to his literary projects once again. He went daily to the British Museum to work on a book about which he had been thinking for several years: a study of the fiction of Victor Hugo. Politics had consumed much of his writing time in recent months, and on Sundays, telephone conversations with the family kept him abreast of the political situation in Peru. In early 1988 he accepted an invitation to deliver a lecture in Iquitos on his most recent novel, El hablador, but the minute he arrived in Peru there were immediate and inevitable political consequences of his presence in his homeland. He was very well received in Iquitos; his son Álvaro noted that even though everyone resisted using the word “candidate,” it was understood that Mario Vargas Llosa was beginning to forge a presidential campaign.68 Amid this political activity in 1988, Vargas Llosa published his eleventh novel, Elogio de la madrastra, a short novel of fourteen chapters and an epilogue with some of the old and some of the new elements of Vargas Llosa’s fiction. This is his fourth of six entertainments. It deals with eroticism and play more elaborately than does his previous fiction. A new topic, and one that some of Vargas Llosa’s cohorts of the 1960s Boom, such as García Márquez, were beginning to fictionalize, also entered into Mario’s novelistic world for the first time: aging. Perhaps as a gesture toward some of the postmodern writers of world fiction, from Borges to Roland Barthes and Italo Calvino, Vargas Llosa reminds us in Elogio de la madrastra that all fiction is artifice. As in his previous novels, Vargas Llosa uses his “communicating vessels”—alternating between two types

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of chapters that affect each other. This novel functions on the basis of the interaction between Vargas Llosa’s literary texts and six paintings, by Jacob Jordaens, François Boucher, Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), Francis Bacon, Fernando de Szyszlo, and Fra Angélico. Novels that juxtapose the written text with painting invite the reader to function as observer. In this novel, the reader-observer discovers that each of the fourteen chapters has something to do with the six paintings, directly or indirectly. Elogio de la madrastra deals with a triangular relationship among Rigoberto, his second wife, Lucrecia, and his son from his first marriage, Alfonso. The anecdotes involve an entire repertoire of material for psychoanalysis: incest, pedophilia, voyeurism, fetishism, and certain fixations. The reader observes the gradual development of an incestuous relationship between Lucrecia the stepmother and the adolescent Alfonso. In the first chapter, Rigoberto seduces Lucrecia and at the end of the chapter, after they have sex, he calls her the wife of the king of Lydia, an allusion to the painting by Jordaens illustrated after the chapter. In this chapter the first suggestions of the incestuous relationship also appear, with touching and supposedly innocent kissing that, in fact, has incestuous resonances. If the author’s challenge in El hablador was the creation of a convincing narrator-storyteller, his task is more complex in this narrative tour de force: now he assumes the voice of multiple unlikely narrators. Thus, the second chapter, like the fifth, the seventh, the ninth, and the twelft h, is narrated by a character from one of the paintings. Candaules, the king of Lydia (or perhaps Rigoberto, with the voice of Candaules), narrates his sexual fantasies, his sexual acts, and his voyeurism. When he describes his sexual relationship, he uses traditional metaphors. But this king is only capable of enjoying maximum sexual pleasure when there is a third person on the scene; at the end of the chapter the king arranges for Giges to observe him and Lucrecia having sex, setting forth the voyeurism that the adolescent boy, Alfonso, will practice. In the fift h chapter the Lucrecia from a painting narrates her erotic life. The seventh chapter is narrated by Amor, a character from a painting, who claims that she is a pagan little god. Here, once again, the young boy Fonchito is mentioned. In the ninth chapter, the narrator is the monstrous being of Bacon’s painting Cabeza I. A voice from de Szyszlo’s painting narrates the twelft h chapter. The fourteenth chapter is narrated by María from the painting La Anunciación. After the first chapter, the plot and the triangular relationship among Rigoberto, Lucrecia, and Alfonso are developed in chapters 3, 4, 6, 8, 10,

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11, 13, and 14. The third chapter establishes the vital sexual relationship between Rigoberto and Lucrecia, thus eliminating the interpretation of the incest as a search for an escape from a frustrating or unacceptable sexual relationship. In the fourth chapter, Lucrecia makes attempts to reject the child’s sexual advances, but in the end she performs in an erotic manner in the bathroom, knowing that the child is watching her. Upon going to bed that night, she has sexual fantasies associated with both the child and Rigoberto’s paintings. In the sixth chapter Rigoberto carries out all his physical rituals to protect himself against the “deterioration” of aging, setting forth that theme. In the eighth chapter the narrator develops the incest openly, with the stepmother kissing the boy Alfonso. Now the child is the “monster,” and is followed by the painting of the same topic. The contrast between chapters 11 and 12 is noteworthy: in the tenth we see Rigoberto’s sexual fantasies, and in eleventh the stepmother finally consummates her sexual relationship with the boy. In chapter 13, the boy tells Rigoberto of his relationship with his stepmother. In the epilogue, Rigoberto and Lucrecia have separated; the boy Alfonso dedicates himself to seducing the maid. With the prohibition of Lucrecia from the home, the patriarchal order is reestablished. «

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Upon entering the political scene full-time in Peru, the world-class writer faced at least two daily challenges. First, he faced an intellectual challenge: how does a modernist writer not lose his sense of literary language and the subtleties of expression when he is required to simplify his language for the mass consumption of a population that is largely semiliterate or illiterate? Second, he had to manage to avoid intellectual asphyxiation while dealing with the grind of politics and his new daily routine. Vargas Llosa used various strategies to deal with these challenges. One was to regularly read, as a discipline, writers with hermetic literary language, from Góngora to Karl Popper. In January 1990, in fact, he sent an article to the prestigious North American academic journal PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association) on Karl Popper. At the same time that Vargas Llosa was defending himself from attacks by Alan García, the APRA, and the Shining Path, he wrote introductory essays on writers such as Joyce (November 1987), Faulkner (December 1987), Boll (January 1988), Fitzgerald (March 1988), Camus (June 1988), Mann (September 1988), Lessing (November 1988), Pasternak (February 1989), Dos Passos (May 1989), Woolf (July 1989), and Steinbeck (Sep-

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tember 1989), among others. In March 1990, a few weeks before the first round of elections in Peru, Vargas Llosa organized an international conference on “The Freedom Revolution,” hosting such figures as the French intellectual Jean-François Revel, the Chilean writer Jorge Edwards, and the Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo. For Vargas Llosa, this symposium was a breath of fresh air. During this period of intense political life, security issues surfaced in a variety of ways, including regular anonymous death threats. In January 1989 Vargas Llosa barely escaped unharmed when a guerrilla group left dynamite on the landing strip at the airport of the town of Pucallpa. Several other plots were discovered by security agents during the process of the campaign. Despite these death threats, Vargas Llosa obviously survived his foray into the real politics of Peru. Perhaps the biggest single event of this adventuresome year took place in March 1990, when Vargas Llosa decided to attend a funeral for a political cohort in the heart of a region (Ayacucho) under the control of the Shining Path, an act of great symbolic importance. The demands of the political campaign meant the suspension of many of his jogging mornings, and regular meetings of his “kitchen cabinet” of advisors, a group that included Frederick Cooper, Luis Bustamante, Raúl Salazar, Felipe Thorndike, Pedro Cateriano, Miguel Vega Alvear, and two key members of his family, Patricia and Álvaro. To the greatest extent possible, other than the meetings with his kitchen cabinet, Vargas Llosa attempted to reserve mornings for his intellectual work, leaving afternoons and evenings for politics. On June 4, 1989, Vargas Llosa traveled to Arequipa, where he had been born some fift y-three years before, and there in southern Peru he officially announced his candidacy for the presidency of the nation, formally launching his campaign for the election to take place in April 1990. As is evident, Vargas Llosa’s political life extended back to the 1950s, and to certain members of his family, as far back as his grandfather Pedro Llosa. Thus, as surprising as his announcement might have been, given his career as a novelist, in the context of Peruvian politics it should not have been that surprising at all. The announcement was also consistent with the Vargas line of the family, which had always been adventurers; running for the presidency was, indeed, one of the most bold adventures of his life up until the age of fift y-three. Vargas Llosa’s politics have been controversial since the late 1960s, when he first began questioning the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. His political vision and statements became even more con-

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troversial in the late 1980s, deriving from his readings of Hayek, Berlin, Friedman, and Popper earlier in the decade. The political program of his Movimiento Libertad and Frente Democrático was built around what Vargas Llosa called “la cultura de la libertad” (“the culture of freedom”). He found inspiration in the changes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was also inspired by the general trend toward privatization in Europe and the Americas. In Mexico, President Salinas had sold many of the largest state-owned companies, such as the copper mining industry, to private industry. Argentina was selling many of its state-owned companies; Chile had a free-market economy oriented toward exportation. For Vargas Llosa, this wave of privatization was a symbol of modernization, as opposed to the long tradition of statism in Peru. The idea of his coalition of the Democratic Front in Peru was to carry out a revolution of a classical liberal nature, with emphasis on economic freedom and in opposition to the strong tradition of state power in Peru. His coalition also emphasized the importance of individual entrepreneurship as opposed to dependence on the state. Vargas Llosa dedicated himself to his presidential race as seriously and intensely as he had in many of his most ambitious literary projects. His full-fledged campaign actually began in September 1989, when he organized his professional team and set the goal of winning the election in the first round in April 1990. His group faced many difficulties, however, the primary one being the fact that the mass media was mostly under the direct or indirect control of the government. The local and international press tended to identify Vargas Llosa as “right wing” or of the “extreme right,” categories that the Peruvian clearly rejected. Despite these disadvantages, Vargas Llosa was in the lead, according to the polls, during the entire year and a half of his campaign. Against the advice of his professional team, Vargas Llosa insisted on operating his campaign on the basis of his principles and his proposals for Peru. His team recommended more emphasis on image and attacking the opposition; Vargas Llosa insisted on substance. The opposition, on the other hand, used television to read erotic passages from his recent novel El elogio de la madrastra as a way of questioning the moral principles of the candidate. Nevertheless, the surveys placed Vargas Llosa with 45 percent of the populace, while each of the opposing candidates had a maximum of 20 percent. In December 1989 Vargas Llosa presented his government platform at an annual conference of Peru’s business executives. Never before in the history of Peru had a presidential candidate presented as transpar-

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ently a plan for such radical change. The plans included the privatization of much of the state-owned industry, the end of many of the privileges of the wealthy, the mobilization of the citizenry under the leadership of the president against guerrilla groups, a radical reform of public education, and a general reduction of the state bureaucracy. The opposition successfully described Vargas Llosa’s plan as a “shock” treatment that sounded alarmingly threatening, and the result was a continual loss of support, as evidenced in the last polls. As the campaign lost momentum, an unknown candidate, Alberto Fujimori, surfaced and successfully portrayed himself as opposed to the established order, and to a Vargas Llosa supposedly representing the old order. In the first round of the elections of April 8, 1990, Vargas Llosa won only 35 percent, while 30 percent voted for Fujimori. Without the support of a strong majority of the populace, Vargas Llosa expressed his intention to resign as a candidate. In the end, however, he did follow through with the last round of the presidential election, subjecting himself to public defamation of character that included, for example, a minister of education declaring in the newspaper that Vargas Llosa was a drug addict. Fujimori won the election on June 10, 1990, and within a few hours Vargas Llosa was on a plane to Europe, visiting Paris and Madrid before returning to London. Once settled in London, Vargas Llosa returned to two pending projects, both of which were part of his work in 1991. For some time, he had been taking notes for a book on Hugo’s Les Misérables, and he continued reading and taking notes for this critical study throughout the 1990s. His other project was the next novel, a continuation in terms of stories, scenarios, and characters from La casa verde and ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? By 1991, he and Patricia were once again on the academic lecture circuit in the United States, and he accepted a visiting professorship at Florida International University.

The Twenty-First-Century Writer and the Nobel Prize (1992– 2010) The twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa has been a citizen of the world, thus living the cosmopolitan dream of many Latin American writers of his generation. His international interests have ranged from a Peruvian author, Arguedas, about whom he published a lengthy book, to Iraq, about which he published a short book.69 He has explored all the clas-

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sic genres of literature—prose fiction, theater, poetry, essay—during this period. Not only intensely involved with the polemics of Latin American literature and politics, as he has been his entire adult life, he has also participated in the European dialogue, perhaps one of several reasons that this period culminated in his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Since 1992, however, he has been exceptionally disciplined, producing some six novels, essays, a play, and three book-length scholarly studies, one on José María Arguedas, another on Victor Hugo, and another on Juan Carlos Onetti. In the 1970s and 1980s he had lived between London and Lima; in the twenty first-century, he took up residency in Madrid and traveled to Lima in the South American summer months, typically spending December through March in Peru. Vargas Llosa received a fellowship to dedicate himself to his writing in Berlin in late 1991 and the first half of 1992. Among his numerous projects—the study of Hugo, the next novel, and a partial autobiography— he made considerable progress on both the novel and the autobiography. In the second half of 1992 Vargas Llosa took up residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he taught a comparative literature course at Harvard University. The next semester (from January to May 1993) he taught a course on fantastic literature in Latin America at Princeton University while he continued work on the novel project. In 1993 two of his recent projects appeared as books, the partial autobiography under the title El pez en el agua (A Fish in Water) and the novel under the title Lituma en los Andes (Lituma in the Andes). In the former, Vargas Llosa offers the most detailed extant account of his childhood, as well as an equally detailed description of his campaign for the presidency of Peru. This narrative offers considerable insight into these two periods of Vargas Llosa’s life—avoiding the problematic anecdotes about his relationship with writers, intellectuals, and political leaders during the 1960s and 1970s, most of whom were still alive when this book appeared in print. In Lituma en los Andes, Vargas Llosa returns to his character Lituma, who had appeared originally in La casa verde and then again in ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? More significant, however, is the writer’s return to a topic that has haunted him since the 1980s—armed guerrilla insurrection and the Shining Path. As had increasingly been the case in Vargas Llosa’s fiction, the events in this novel seem to transpire inexplicably. As Efraín Kristal has pointed out correctly, the violence in this novel occurs without any rational explanation.70 The Shining Path is in control of the region where Lituma is assigned to a military outpost.

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There, he and two other military soldiers are assigned to investigate the deaths of three people in complex and shadowy circumstances. Another narrative line deals with the sexual fantasies of one of Lituma’s sidekicks. This first novel of Vargas Llosa’s twenty-first-century work, interestingly, is his last reflection on the guerrilla warfare of the twentieth century. In several ways, his twenty-first-century works tend to be reflections on the previous century (see part II). «

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The stark political realities of everyday politics in Peru during the political campaign of 1990 laid the groundwork for what might be identified as the third stage of Vargas Llosa’s intellectual career, his antiutopian period. In the twenty-first century, utopianism per se became a topic of his writing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the second period in his writing career, Vargas Llosa had become progressively more disillusioned with his leftist and sometimes utopian political agenda. Even during the 1960s there had been some signs that Vargas Llosa might not remain with the Left. In 1964, when his idol Jean-Paul Sartre declared that African writers should abandon their pens to fight hunger, Vargas Llosa felt betrayed. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Peruvian writer had rejected Sartre, rejected the armed violence of the idealist and utopian guerrilla movements in both Peru and throughout Latin America, and rejected a portion of the political agenda of much of the traditional Left in Latin America. Vargas Llosa’s three key works with respect to utopianism are his essay on José María Arguedas titled La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo (1996, untranslated, The archaic utopia) and the novels El paraíso en la otra esquina, and El sueño del celta. La utopía arcaica is his scholarly study of the Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas and el indigenismo in Peru, beginning with an historical overview of the concept of indigenismo in Mexico. In this admirably researched scholarly study, Vargas Llosa walks a thin line. On the one hand, he exhibits admiration for Arguedas, a writer who spent a lifetime struggling to survive as a novelist in Peru; Vargas Llosa has often written of these difficulties for Peruvian writers, and does indeed sympathize with those Peruvians who have made the decision to pursue careers as writers. On the other, Arguedas is a writer dedicated to the indigenista project, and Vargas Llosa is, in the end, deeply skeptical and stridently critical of this movement, which had peaked in the 1930s and

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1940s and which Vargas Llosa demonstrates was implicitly racist in conceptualization. In reviewing the academic studies of indigenismo, Vargas Llosa explains how the political and literary versions of indigenismo were fading in the 1960s, when the symbol of the indigenous past shifted from the Inca Garcilaso to Guaman Poma de Ayala. The latter insisted on maintaining pureza de la sangre (pure blood), and rejected the idea of intermarriage between the Spaniards and the indigenous groups. Messianic groups, such as the Taki Onqoy, attempted to reject cultural and religious acculturation, and returned to what would become, with time, a tradition of utopía arcaica. Vargas Llosa describes the utopía arcaica as “la restauración de un pasado míticamente embellecido con elementos asimilados de la cultura ‘dominante’ y la fantasía creadora de los escritores y artistas.”71 This is the case of Arguedas, in his fictional world, which is based to a great extent on the myths of the “utopía arcaica.” His idea of Arguedas’s indigenismo is that it is “una rica ficción” (“a rich fiction”) that has its roots in its pre-Hispanic past. For Vargas Llosa, indigenismo in general, and the fiction of Arguedas in particular, are based on these outdated or “archaic” utopias (La utopía, 273). In the conclusion of his book on utopia and Arguedas, he claims that this vision is now dead in the twenty-first century: what is undeniable is that traditional Andean society—communitarian, magic-realist, Quechua speaking, conservative in its collectivist values—a society that fed the literary fiction of indigenismo, no longer exists (La utopía, 335). Peruvian reality of the twenty-first century, according to Vargas Llosa, has little or nothing to do with the utopian fiction of the utopía arcaica, for Peru is not that old Peru envisioned as the “Hispanic Peru” (Perú hispanista), nor indio (Indian), nor blanco (white), nor indigenista, and Vargas Llosa’s final conclusion is that modern Peru is not the one fabulado, or fictionalized, by Arguedas. Writers in Peru who believed in the utopía arcaica, from Guaman Poma de Ayala to José María Arguedas, spent centuries, concludes Vargas Llosa, constructing a sueño, a dream. All in all, this critical study is an important early statement of the twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa on utopian thought, for he has established a continuous line of utopian thinking in Peru from the Colonial period to the mid-twentieth century. Eight years later, in 2004, Vargas Llosa finally came forth with his critical study of Hugo and Les Misérables (a book he had been planning for over a decade) under the title La tentación de lo imposible: Víctor Hugo y Los Miserables. His fo-

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cus in this book is not utopian thought. Nevertheless, in his conclusion, in the book’s very last paragraph, he does refer to Victor Hugo’s “visión utópica,” the utopian vision that leads this French writer to believe that humanity was advancing toward justice, liberty, and peace. The most lengthy and thorough novelistic consideration of utopian thought by this twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa is the novel El paraíso en la otra esquina. As Fernando La Fuente has pointed out, the two main characters, Flora Tristán and Paul Gauguin, represent the two Arcadias fictionalized in the novel, two broad lines of utopian thought that date back to the nineteenth century.72 One line grows out of the Enlightenment and arose with the French Revolution and the promise of progress through industrialization and modernization, accompanied by principles of justice, liberty, and equality. This line of utopian thought is embodied in the fictional character of Flora Tristán (1801–1844), who expounds her ideas in L’Union ouvrière and shares with Charles Fourier a utopian desire to transform the individual and society from its roots, to create a harmonious society in which not only would exploitation and poverty end, but also justice would reign. The second general line of utopian thought in the novel is fictionalized in the character of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903); this is a form of mystical, rural, primitive thinking that circulated in late nineteenth-century Europe. Gauguin’s version of these ideas involves rejecting his bourgeois life as a stockbroker, becoming an artist, and seeking the Utopia of what he views as the ideal of the authentically primitive. Early in his career as an artist, as novelized by Mario Vargas Llosa, Gauguin searches briefly for inspiration in the authentically rural Brittany. His discovery of Tahiti, however, provides his ultimate utopia, which for him is the ultimate rejection of bourgeois values as well as a route to a real and authentic art: the sexual body. Gauguin conceptualizes the bodies of his adolescent lovers as the inspiration for his new art. Thus, his utopia in Tahiti is, in reality, a somewhat Romanticized version of a communion with nature as the body, and original, authentic art as a product of Romantic inspiration. Gauguin’s distancing from decadent late nineteenth-century Europe is the opposite of Flora Tristán’s relationship with society, for she actively seeks interaction with the groups and individuals that she firmly believes she will reform with her ideas. Her early to mid-nineteenth-century campaign for workers’ rights and equality for women placed her in direct contact with a broad spectrum of French society. For her, unlike Gauguin, the sexual body offers no ideal, as she basically rejects her own

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sexual body after divorcing her husband, with the exception of one brief lesbian encounter. For Flora, the vehicle for reaching utopia is not sexual interaction, but her tireless campaign and her publication, L’Union ouvrière, which she distributes with obstinate dedication. Thus, whereas the fictionalized Paul Gauguin embodies much of what is a late nineteenth-century Romanticism combined with tardy Darwinism, Flora is a product of Enlightenment ideas, a woman driven by concepts to which she is fully and slavishly committed. She is seemingly unaware, throughout her political campaigns and travels, that relatively few of her interlocutors are interested in her ideas, and most of those with whom she interacts—workers or fellow utopians—are either indifferent or openly opposed to her radical plans for transforming French society. In this sense, she shares with Gauguin an isolation on her own self-constructed metaphorical utopian island: in his case it is a physical island of sexual desire and inspired creativity, and in hers it is one of Enlightenment ideas. Gauguin writes political diatribes against the modernization of Tahiti, but dies relatively unaffected by political reality. Flora does face one defeat after another, as she moves from town to town in France, and thus fails to effect change toward a more utopian or even slightly more just French society. She is generally rejected by the bourgeois establishment, by other utopian leaders, and even by the workers. In El paraíso en la otra esquina, Vargas Llosa presents two characters with whom he seems to sympathize as human beings struggling to live in their respective utopias in light of the real realities each faces: Gauguin’s body degenerates via syphilis; Gauguin is first unable to accept living in the world of a traditional marriage and high finance, and then spends his later years, as an artist, dying of venereal disease. Flora also finds a traditional marriage as unbearable as the limited rights of women and workers. Their respective missions as artist and political activist have many admirable qualities. Nevertheless, by the end of the novel Gauguin is unable to function in society and seemingly insane; Flora Tristán is so innocent in judging her fellow human beings that she is politically unviable, ineffective. The work that appeared after El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, is a twenty-first-century love story that, on the surface, would seem to add little to the topic of utopianism and political reality in Vargas Llosa’s recent fiction. It is the sixth of Vargas Llosa’s entertainments. It tells the story of an aging Peruvian, Ricardo Somocurcio, who is living a modest existence in Paris as a translator and is deeply

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in love with a much younger Peruvian woman whose only interest in men, including him, is to exploit them for her own sexual and monetary benefit. In his early years in Paris, in the 1960s, the then-young Peruvian meets with his friends from Peru who were involved with armed guerrilla movements in their home country. The protagonist sympathizes with the individuals who visit him in Paris, and one of them even claims that, once the revolution triumphs in Peru, their contact in Paris will become their ambassador in France. Living in Paris, however, the protagonist is relatively passive in his support of these individuals as friends, and actually contributes nothing to the revolutionary cause in Peru. His real interests are surviving in Paris as a translator and his true obsession, the bad girl with whom he is in love. His revolutionary friends, most of whom end up dead or incarcerated, are presented in the novel as admirable in their utopian ideals, but pathetic in their political acumen and efficacy. By midway in the novel, these minor characters are abandoned. Vargas Llosa’s most recent novel and perhaps the centerpiece of his twenty-first-century writing, El sueño del celta, is the most elaborate of his twenty-first-century rethinking of utopian thought and is his fictionalized version of the life of the British diplomat and Irish nationalist Roger Casement. The first part of the novel deals with Casement’s experience in the Belgian Congo, where he observes widespread abuse of African slaves, and eventually writes reports on this exceptionally cruel exploitation, which is related to the rubber industry in Africa. In this part of his life Casement is seen as a model citizen of the Enlightenment, in which European reason, as exercised by him, corrects the misuse of reason by the European colonizers. Highly esteemed by the British government after his conscientious work in Africa, Casement receives another government appointment, now to investigate claims of similar abuse of indigenous peoples, but in the upper Amazonian region of Peru and Ecuador. This is the setting for the second part of El sueño del celta. At this stage, the figure of Roger Casement is the renowned diplomat whose very presence in the Amazon constitutes a political threat for the local broker, the owner of a Peruvian rubber company, the real historical figure of César Arana, who dies penniless. In both of these first two parts, there are brief scenes describing the sexual fantasies of Casement and possible encounters with physically attractive males. By the third part of the novel, Casement has become an Irish nationalist and activist in ways comparable to idealists and utopians of a lineage of interest to Vargas Llosa: this line of characters includes José María Arguedas, Flora Tristán, Paul Gauguin, and the Peruvian armed

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guerrillas of the 1960s (and Vargas Llosa himself in Caracas in 1967). In the third part of El sueño del celta, Casement is based in Europe; the time period is World War I. In his extreme dedication to a utopian nationalist cause, Casement establishes contact with the German government and offers a plan to recruit Irish soldiers from among the prisoners of war held by the Germans in order to create a special Irish battalion, supported by the Germans, to attack England. The realpolitik of this extravagant plan, however, is distant from the political reality of war and the postwar period. Casement’s strategy with the Germans fails, he is accused of treason, and he is eventually executed. By the time he is executed, the British government has successfully ruined his reputation by publicizing his personal diaries. These diaries contain claims of sexual encounters with adolescent boys; some historians believe the diaries to have been falsified by the British government in order to ruin Casement’s reputation. Casement is the last of Vargas Llosa’s failed utopians. «

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As a citizen of the world, as well as an ex-candidate for the presidency of Peru, Vargas Llosa found it necessary, facing threats from President-elect Fujimori, to become a citizen of Spain in 1993. Since then he has held dual citizenship. He has become a member of that prestigious Spanish institution, the Real Academia Española de la Lengua. In Madrid, he is known not only as the Peruvian-Spanish author of over fifteen books, but as the thinker who often publishes editorials, usually on topics of political interest related to the defense of human rights and freedom of the press, in El País; as the avid fan of bullfights; and as the equally enthusiastic follower of fútbol—European and Latin American professional soccer. The Vargas Llosas spent several months in 1994 in Washington, DC, while Mario taught a course at Georgetown University on Julio Cortázar’s short stories; by the mid-1990s they found themselves increasingly attracted to Spain, and eventually took up residence in central Madrid, where Vargas Llosa has been able to organize his life exactly as it has functioned best for him: writing in the early morning, walking and then writing again late in the morning until mid-afternoon; reading and selfediting in the afternoon, often in nearby cafés; and enjoying cultural and social life in the evening. During this period—the mid- to late 1990s—he accepted frequent invitations to participate in academic symposia in European universities—many of them in France—most of which have been

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centered on his work. His most recent return to an early and lifelong interest—theater—was manifest once again in 2008 by his not only writing yet another play, Las mil y una noches, but also performing in it in several cities. In 1997 Vargas Llosa published his thirteenth novel, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto), a continuation of Elogio de la madrastra, for this novel contains the same group of characters and further explores the same topics. This is the fifth of his six entertainments, along with Elogio de la madrastra, Pantaleón y las visitadoras, La tía Julia y el escribidor, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, and the later Travesuras de la niña mala. This novel returns to the triangular relationship among Lucrecia, Rigoberto, and the child Alfonso (who once again appears with his nickname, “Fonchito”). The young boy manages to establish contact with Lucrecia, despite her efforts to maintain distance. Later, using anonymous letters, the boy manages to manipulate the relationship between Lucrecia and Rigoberto. As in Elogio de la madrastra, the novel’s dynamism is based on literary play similar to the games in La tía Julia y el escribidor. The reader has access to Rigoberto’s texts, revealing his sexual fantasies. On the one hand, the reader is entertained by the details of his sexual fantasies, particularly because of his rigidity, which reaches humorous proportions, recalling much of the personality of characters such as Pantaleón Pantoja and Pedro Camacho. On the other hand, many of these personality quirks (such as the rigidity) are just exaggerated versions of Vargas Llosa’s own personality, creating another level of reading, or self-parody. Several of Vargas Llosa’s ongoing interests appear in this novel, including the issue of individual freedom in the context of the good of society at large. In this case, Rigoberto is the character in favor of absolute individual freedom. Once again, as in several previous novels, Vargas Llosa presents an obsessive personality. As in Elogio de la madrastra, the characters do not act according to any “human nature.” Rather, their actions have their source in art—paintings and texts to which Rigoberto has access. In yet another level of parody, Rigoberto writes comments about the Uruguayan author Juan Carlos Onetti, the same author about whom Vargas Llosa has written articles and eventually, a book.73 In the late 1990s, Vargas Llosa engaged himself in research and travel related to the life of the former dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. A few weeks after the publication of La fiesta del Chivo, Vargas Llosa declared that the true history of humanity is not the history of democracy, but of figures such as Trujillo.

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Within a year of having completed the novel, he was interviewing citizens whose descriptions of their fallen dictator, Saddam Hussein, were remarkably similar to what citizens of the Dominican Republic had told Vargas Llosa about Trujillo. In the early 1990s, Vargas Llosa had scandalized the Mexican political establishment with his declaration that the old PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), still in power at the time under a very thin guise of democracy, was la dictadura perfecta— the perfect dictatorship.74 In contrast, the Trujillo dictatorship would be better described as “imperfect”—an overtly abusive and violent exercise of brute power with no pretense of democracy—until the dictator was finally assassinated in 1961. The reader sees Trujillo as the prototypical military figure in his best years, and then, with aging, as a decrepit sexual abuser. Covering several decades, the novel shows how the dictator maintains power and abuses power using many of the same strategies seen in military figures of Conversación en La Catedral, as well as other modern Latin American literary classics in the genre of the dictator novel, such as El recurso del método (1975, Reasons of State) by Alejo Carpentier and García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (1975, The Autumn of the Patriarch). The major portion of the action in La fiesta del Chivo, however, takes place in 1961, as the assassination plot is described, piece by piece. With respect to the empirical reality related to the perverse political and sexual events in the novel, Vargas Llosa explained in an interview, correctly, “No inventé nada que no hubiera podido ocurrir” (“I did not invent anything that could not have happened”).75 Indeed, Vargas Llosa knew the real Trujillo regime well, for his research in the late 1990s was the final complement to a dictatorship that the Peruvian first began to learn about in 1975 during his stay of several months in the Dominican Republic to make a film version of Pantaleón y las visitadoras; during this visit, his introduction to Trujillo consisted of anecdotes he heard verbally while on the island and the reading of a few books on Trujillo. On this and other trips to the island, Vargas Llosa learned much of the popular mythology about Trujillo, and the character that he created in the novel contained much of the popular myth, some of the historical figure, and, of course, the author’s own invention, based on these two sources. Upon publishing this work, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers of his five “entertainments” that he was still, also, the writer with a lifelong commitment to questioning the abuse of power in the format of lengthy works that seemingly aspired to be those “total” novels.

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On a rainy Sunday morning in early December 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa, Patricia, and an entourage of family and close friends boarded a flight from Madrid to Sweden. It was an adventure of even larger proportions than Ernesto Vargas’s audacious trip from Peru to Buenos Aires in the 1930s: this twenty-first-century Vargas’s adventure was to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm. The intellectual centerpiece of the week was Vargas Llosa’s Nobel speech on Tuesday, “Elogio de la Lectura y la Ficción” (“In Praise of Reading and Fiction”), in which he addressed the Europeans’ failure (as well as the failure of the colonizing white and elite oligarchies) to deal fairly and appropriately with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. He also recognized his debts among writers, highlighting once again, above all, his masters Flaubert and Faulkner. The overall tone of the Nobel acceptance speech was one of gratitude. At the end of his week in Stockholm, he gave the official toast at the ceremonial dinner in which each of the Nobel laureates actually received the prize. In this speech, Vargas Llosa invented his own version of a fairy tale, retelling his own incredible adventure story—his life story—as a childhood fable.76

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Part II

A Novelist for the Twenty-First Century

V

argas Llosa has remained as active a novelist in recent years as he was in his youth, and his most noteworthy novels of the twenty-first century are Lituma en los Andes, La fiesta del Chivo, El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, and El sueño del celta.1 For Vargas Llosa, as well as for many Latin American writers, the more important epochal shift took place not exactly in 2000 with the new millennium, but more significantly in 1992, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the former Soviet Republic, with the rise of the Internet, and after the reflections on the five-hundredth anniversary of the Spanish presence in the Americas. For Vargas Llosa specifically, his new life (his third period) began in Europe after his failed presidential campaign in Peru. This is a stage in Vargas Llosa’s writing career about which, on the surface, one might well reach the conclusion, as several critics have, that the author has become a pessimist with respect to culture and politics in Latin America, indeed the future of Latin American society. Nevertheless, it will be shown that there are some notes of optimism in the writing of this period. These five novels might well represent the most accomplished and ambitious period of Vargas Llosa’s writing since the 1960s Boom, when he came forth with La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral. In these five twenty-first-century novels, the Vargas Llosa reader finds some familiar terrain, as well as explorations of new facets of individual human experience, and the inclusion of distant societies not previously part of the Peruvian writer’s fictional world. These five books, in their totality, comprise Vargas Llosa’s most personal and compelling meditation on trauma, which is qualitatively different from his dealings with the subject in the earlier twentieth-century works. In-

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deed, as I will argue here, these novels could well represent Vargas Llosa at his very best. The work of this period, particularly La fiesta del Chivo and El sueño del celta, is more closely aligned with his modernist project than his dialogue with the postmodern. The modernist work is interesting and noteworthy for the ways patterns unfold in themselves, but these patterns or systems are less rigid and more variable in this twenty-first-century work than in the major novels of the twentieth century. Vargas Llosa remains fascinated with the ways in which he can tell stories by using variations on what Jonathan Culler has called “omnicommunicative narrators” and, in contrast, deliberately suppressive omniscient narrators. Among the five novels under consideration here, four contain narrators that operate, to some degree, as deliberately suppressive omniscient narrators. Vargas-Llosa-the-reader uses the term “crater” to describe unforgettable moments in a novel when powerful actions or events take place. The scholar Jean Franco refers to a reading phenomenon comparable to Vargas Llosa’s craters when she speaks of the intensity of reading modern texts. In her reflections on Borges, she proposes that fictions can be compared to a spiritual exercise in which the world must be read skeptically in order to provide the motor force for spiritual withdrawal and privatized intensity.2 In her essay on Borges, she proposes that this Argentine writer makes literature into a highly personal experience. For Franco, Borges believes that experience can only be individual: the more intense the experience, the more it satisfies our immortal longings. “Intensity” is thus what is at stake for Borges in literature, according to Franco, and I would add that in Vargas Llosa’s work, increasingly, from the 1960s to the twenty-first-century novels such as El paraíso en la otra esquina, it is a similar priority for this writer who, as a reader, prizes “craters” in novels. He self-consciously constructs “craters” in his fiction, and then, in his essays, theorizes about “craters” as a key component of a reader’s experience. Borges and Vargas Llosa differ from many of their cohorts in Latin America, such as Pablo Neruda and García Márquez, in allowing this intensity to be readerly rather than reserving it for the poet or the creator as representative of the comunitas. In this discussion, we are speaking of the Neruda of the Canto General and the early García Márquez of the cycle of Macondo. As Franco has observed, Neruda and García Márquez retain an identification of culture with community. In his twenty-firstcentury fiction—and this is evident in El paraíso en la otra esquina and

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in fact all five of these novels—Vargas Llosa prioritizes intensity of personal experience and is skeptical of writers such as García Márquez and Neruda (whom he openly ridicules in these works) who think of themselves as representatives of the comunitas. With respect to the familiar, these five novels are ambitious, totalizing works in the lineage of Vargas Llosa’s “total” novels. More specifically, La fiesta del Chivo and El sueño del celta are in the totalizing lineage of Conversación en La Catedral and La guerra del fin del mundo. In his less ambitious Lituma en los Andes, Vargas Llosa also relies on his trademark shifting of perspective—his “communicating vessels” (vasos comunicantes)—to present the tragic series of events surrounding two young French tourists. Initially, the French couple appears directly in the first chapter as the innocent and unaware tourists who assume the good will of all entities around them in Peru—even as the Shining Path hijacks the bus in which they ride and orders all the passengers to exit from the vehicle. After this initial direct and close-up presentation of the French couple, the reader never again sees them directly as actors in the novel. Rather, from stories involving the other characters we become aware of the final outcome: in the second chapter Lituma hears of the attack of the bus and that the young French couple had been stoned to death. In chapter 3, the couple is mentioned for a third time, after an assault, with a brief reference to how their faces were “beaten to a pulp.”3 From the early novels La ciudad y los perros and La casa verde to this set of novels produced in the twenty-first century, Vargas Llosa has used this strategy, inviting readers to see the fictional lives up close, and then allowing scenarios to unfold as they do in real life—the reader gradually pieces together the whole as different life stories overlap. This use of multiple perspectives—communicating vessels—is an important basis for what underlies both these five novels and Vargas Llosa’s novelistic career: strong development of plot and strong suspense. The suspense in Lituma en los Andes is based, from the beginning of the novel, on a death threat: the invasion of the town and the military garrison that Lituma and his soldiers protect is imminent from the novel’s first narrative segment; this threat of being overwhelmed and brutally slaughtered by the Shining Path remains at the end of the novel: Shining Path is still taking control of entire towns, killing anyone whom they perceive as an enemy, and destroying private property at random. On another level—another plot line—Lituma and Tomás Carreño maintain a dialogue in each chapter that creates suspense around the lives of these two characters. On the one hand, the reader learns of Li-

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tuma’s special attachment to his hometown of Piura and his seemingly urgent desire to be with his old sidekicks, the Inconquistables (“The Champions” in the English translation), back in the Mangachería neighborhood of Piura. On the other hand, the reader learns of Carreño’s relationship with the love of his life, Mercedes. Carreño returns obsessively to the topic of his love/hate relationship with Mercedes. The dialogue between the two includes intermittent references to the physical need for sex that subvert any idealistic vision the reader might start to develop of Piura as utopia (in the case of Lituma) or Mercedes as the ideal woman (in the case of Carreño). More specifically, Lituma and Carreño operate too frequently on the basis of primordial instinct for the reader to accept their occasionally idealistic language associated with Piura and Mercedes: they are questionable idealists. Nevertheless, these two basic story lines—the imminent attack of the Shining Path and the personal tales of Lituma and Carreño—are the foundations upon which Vargas Llosa builds his double-layered plot. In addition, Lituma en los Andes is replete with stories of an intriguing and sometimes exotic Andean world, one in which traditional indigenous rural tales are told in the context of confusing urban legends of the Shining Path. Thus, we follow the indigenous legends of the cannibalistic pishtacos, who supposedly murder humans to eat human fat, and urban legends about the Shining Path, who take over rural villages and commit atrocities against human beings comparable to those of the pishtacos. In his analysis of Lituma en los Andes, Misha Kokotovic delineates four plot lines: the investigation that Lituma carries out regarding the disappearance of three men; the failed love affair as narrated by Carreño; the story of the couple who own the local town bar, Adriana and Dionisio; and the story of five violent attacks by the Shining Path.4 As Deborah Cohn has pointed out, Kokotovic’s synthesis is illuminating, for each of the five chapters in part I has three sections that narrate, respectively, Lituma’s investigation, an attack of the Shining Path, and an episode of Carreño’s love story. Similarly, each of the four chapters in part III has three sections, although here the second section focuses on Adriana and Dionisio, rather than the Shining Path.5 In classic Vargas Llosa mode, this structure suggests a thematic one. Kokotovic observes that the epilogue contains the culmination of each man’s quest: Carreño’s love story reaches a happy ending; Lituma finds answers that only thwart his pursuit of justice. All in all, this is classic Vargas Llosa manipulating a plot: the epilogue both resolves ambiguity and creates other unresolved ambiguities.

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As recent writings of Culler and Vargas Llosa himself have demonstrated, matters of narrators and omniscience are as important to reading narrative in the twenty-first century as they were in the twentieth.6 In his 2007 book The Literary in Theory, Culler discusses how problematic, for example, different types of omniscience can be in fiction.7 In his twentieth-century book on Flaubert and Madame Bovary, as well as his twenty-first-century book on Victor Hugo and Les Misérables, Vargas Llosa scrutinizes these French narratives as a reader acutely aware of the nuances of omniscience, as well as related matters of narrators and narrative point of view. Culler points out that one basis of omniscience often appears to be the frequently articulated analogy between God and the author (Culler, 184); Vargas Llosa began his book-length study of García Márquez with his theory of the author as a substitute for God and, in parallel fashion, with writing as an act of “deicide” (deicidio). Citing Steinberg, Culler also distinguishes between the “omnicommunicative narrators” of Trollope, who do not withhold any important information, from the “deliberately suppressive narrator” of Fielding, who withholds information he indicates that he possesses in order to create and maintain suspense (Culler, 187). In the context of reading Vargas Llosa, the omnicommunicative narrator of the Spanish language is the product of nineteenth-century novelists such as Benito Pérez Galdós of Spain, Clorinda Matto de Turner of Peru, Alberto Blest Gana of Chile, and José López Portillo y Rojas of Mexico. Ranging from far too omniscient to far too wordy, the narrators of these authors are the very writers Vargas Llosa has categorically and systematically rejected—almost exclusively because of their narrators— at the same time that he has enthusiastically embraced Flaubert and his “transparent” narrator. In Lituma en los Andes, in these five twenty-firstcentury novels, and in much of Vargas Llosa’s previous fiction, the extradiegetic or external narrator is Culler’s deliberately suppressive narrator. This supposedly “omniscient” (deliberately suppressive) narrator systematically limits the reader’s access to information about Vargas Llosa’s fictional world, sometimes accomplishing this by employing what Vargas Llosa calls the dato escondido (the hidden piece of information). In La ciudad y los perros, for example, the deliberately suppressed narrator never reveals who assassinated the cadet who mysteriously dies of a gunshot wound during military exercises. The missing information about this death is the dato escondido. In La casa verde, to the novel’s very end, certain key details about the lives of Anselmo in Piura and

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Fushía in the jungle are never revealed. In both novels, a variety of characters other than the narrator contribute to the ambiguity by speculating in contradictory ways about the details surrounding the work of the deliberately suppressive omniscient narrator. In Lituma en los Andes, Vargas Llosa’s omniscient narrator portrays a military camp under siege by the Shining Path, but this precise control of the narrator—this precise control of an omniscient deliberately suppressive narrator—means that the reader is never able to discern fully to what extent this seemingly imminent danger is real and what the ultimate outcome at the military camp might be. Several critics have pointed to the pessimism of Lituma en los Andes. Efraín Kristal maintains that pessimism is patent in Lituma en los Andes at the same time that he underscores the novel’s violence.8 For the first time in Vargas Llosa’s fiction, according to Kristal, the violent instincts of some characters have no rational explanation. Unlike in some of Vargas Llosa’s earlier work, where violence is the result of religious or political fanaticism, now violence just happens. As Kristal points out correctly, Lituma en los Andes is Vargas Llosa’s first literary response to the Shining Path.9 According to Roy C. Boland, the recent novels such as Lituma en los Andes, independent of political and economic theories that one might use to explain Peru, suggest that one of the great problems of the country is the ignorance and resentment that divide Peruvians among themselves.10 For Boland, the enormity of the Peruvian dilemma in Lituma en los Andes is transmitted by the shadow of Camarada Gonzalo, the leader who systematically assassinates in the name of ideology.11 Cohn agrees about the pessimism observed by these critics, pointing to Vargas Llosa’s portrayal of an “apocalyptic” Peru in both Historia de Mayta and Lituma en los Andes.12 According to Cohn, in Lituma en los Andes Vargas Llosa attributes the nation’s situation to the dissemination of indigenous traditions as well as to the violence of Shining Path. In reality, the problem is not so much the indigenous traditions themselves as it is the ignorant and fearful interpretation of those traditions. In accordance with these critics, however, this is indeed one of Vargas Llosa’s most pessimistic novels. When the rational capacity of human beings dissipates or is dysfunctional, Vargas Llosa does seem, on the surface, to lose hope; it is a somber and immanently dangerous fictional world. Irrational forces had appeared in novels such as La casa verde and, even more prominently, La guerra del fin del mundo. In Lituma en los Andes, however, irrational forces seem overwhelmingly powerful and threatening to the entire human population.

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And with respect to the reader, he or she is able to take refuge in nothing more than the aesthetic pleasure of observing a pattern unfold—even participating in the unfolding of the pattern—in novels such as La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral. In Lituma en los Andes, the pattern is basically simple. The one note that saves Lituma en los Andes from an absolute pessimism (or a kind of nihilism) begins with storytelling and ends with survival: Carreño and Lituma tell stories and, in the end—perhaps partially with the aid of storytelling, and despite all the threats to their lives—they survive. «

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In La fiesta del Chivo, Vargas Llosa uses the technique of the communicating vessels, plot suspense, and subtleties of the narrator with more proximity to the novels of the 1960s than he does in Lituma en los Andes. The omniscient narrator is sometimes deliberately suppressive. The subject of La fiesta del Chivo is the former dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the authoritarian head of state from 1930 to 1961. The historical and political focus of this novel is the Trujillo dictatorship; nevertheless, the protagonist of La fiesta del Chivo is Urania Cabral, the daughter of Senator Agustín Cabral, Trujillo’s right-hand man for much of his dictatorship. Using a narrative strategy that he had exploited fully in his previous dictator novel, Conversación en La Catedral, and to a lesser degree in Historia de Mayta, Vargas Llosa makes a dialogue between two characters his point of departure for entering into multiple temporal and spatial planes or levels of reality. In this case, the opening dialogue is between Urania and her decrepit, moribund father. Consequently, the reader experiences the dictatorship, its downfall, and its aftermath from the numerous perspectives of an author who fully exploits the possibilities of the communicating vessels—multiple perspectives that change the whole. As is Conversación en La Catedral, this is a novel of both political and sexual truculence. And as in Conversación en La Catedral and La guerra del fin del mundo, the real generator of much of the novel’s action is less the politics of the surface (despite obvious political motives) than individual desire and quirky personalities. Vargas Llosa’s use of communicating vessels in La fiesta del Chivo is less rigidly systematic than in many of his twentieth-century novels. The operating principle of the communicating vessels is basically the same: the reader’s focus moves back and forth, from Urania to a group

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of conspirators who plan the assassination of Trujillo. In the novels of the 1960s, and many of the later works, this type of change in focus took place as a rigid alternation of chapters. In this twenty-first-century novel, however, the first chapter focuses on Urania and the second and third chapters focus on the conspirators. Up until the sixteenth chapter, this asymmetrical pattern continues: seven consecutive chapters focus on the conspirators, leading up to the last chapter, which centers on Urania. In this twenty-first-century novel we find Vargas Llosa’s new, entirely asymmetrical use of his formerly more rigid employment of communicating vessels. Vargas Llosa constructs an intensely suspenseful plot in La fiesta del Chivo; indeed, it is a paragon of the possibilities of an engaging plot for any writer. He develops two basic story lines throughout the novel. On the one hand, the reader follows the intricacies of a group of plotters failing to overthrow Trujillo but, in the end, actually doing so. On the other, the reader slowly discovers how Urania is betrayed by her father and lead into the trap of being raped by Trujillo. The functions of the narrator and the multiple focalizers are exceptionally interesting and carry resonances of a dictator novel that Vargas Llosa knows well: García Márquez’s fictionalization of another Caribbean dictator in El otoño del patriarca. García Márquez tells the story of an isolated dictator who is a seer or focalizer, and who often finds solace by looking out the window of the presidential palace to observe the sea.13 In Vargas Llosa’s version of this situation—a more feminist version—the focalizer observing the sea is not the dictator but Urania. In the opening chapter of La fiesta del Chivo, Urania returns to Santo Domingo after a four-decade absence, committed to finally dealing with her traumatic past as an adolescent. Upon her arrival in a city that has been transformed since she last saw it, she is the “seer” or focalizer. She looks out the window of her hotel at the beginning of the novel (second paragraph): “She waits for the sea to become visible through the window of her room on the ninth floor of the Hotel Jaragua, and at last she sees it.”14 Here she is positioned in a place similar to the solitary power as the dictator in El otoño del patriarca: she is the focalizer observing the sea through a window. The passage continues as follows: The darkness fades in a few seconds and the brilliant blue of the horizon quickly intensifies, beginning the spectacle she has been anticipating since she woke at four in spite of the pill she had taken, breaking

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her rule against sedatives. The dark blue surface of the ocean, marked by streaks of foam, extends to a leaden sky at the line of the horizon while here, at the shore, it breaks in resounding, white-capped waves against the Sea Walk, the Malecón, where she can make out sections of the broad road through the palms and almond trees that line it. (3–4)

What Urania sees here, as focalizer, foreshadows her encounter with her traumatic past. Thus, the “brilliant blue” of the horizon seems to anticipate the intensely emotional nature of her work, over the next few hundred pages, as a victim who will attempt to more fully understand her trauma as a pathway to recovery.15 As such, her work that begins as focalizer looking out the hotel window parallels the work of Vargas Llosa, whose entire body of work is his reworking of his own traumatic past. In the cases of both—Urania and Vargas Llosa—the centerpiece of the trauma is the authoritarian and abusive father. After the reference to the “brilliant blue,” the next phrase that stands out is the reference to her anticipation of the “spectacle” that has kept her awake since four in the morning. This reenactment of her trauma, which is what her visit to her father will be, promises indeed to be a “spectacle.” In the remainder of the paragraph, the white-capped waves contrast with the blue waves, seemingly suggesting a possible undermining of the old traumas, perhaps even a potential liberation from them. Near the end of this passage, after she sees the white waves, Urania observes a road that leads beyond the Malecón. This road seems to allude to her pathway to recovery; it is also a foreshadowing of the isolated roads that a group of conspirators will hide around in order to ambush the Trujillo figure in the novel, as well as the very road on which she herself will travel on the way to her traumatic rape. All in all, the early pages of the novel set up much of what will happen in the remainder of the work. In addition to our thinking of the plot as a dual interplay of communicating vessels, as Clive Griffin has pointed out, it can be conceived as three principal strands.16 The first covers Trujillo’s activities on May 30, 1961, which will culminate in his assassination; this plot line occupies chapters 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, and 18. These passages include interiorizations of Trujillo and his myriad of personal and political problems. The second strand, which appears in chapters 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15, deals with four men who conspire to assassinate the dictator. They are the real historical figures who execute the ambush that May of 1961. In this narrative line,

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Vargas Llosa demonstrates his capacity for creating and maintaining suspense, which is in effect until the end of the novel. The third strand, already mentioned above, involves Urania’s return to Santo Domingo and her confrontation with her traumatic past. Elaborated in chapters 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, and 24, it also takes place in a single day. (Some chapters [16, 17, 19–22] contain elements related to more than one strand or narrative line.) Now a successful lawyer in the United States, where she has lived since the age of fourteen, she returns to see her aging and ailing father, Agustín Cabral, who had once served in the inner circle of the dictatorial regime. Once again Vargas Llosa is building suspense, for the reader is not aware of the exact source of her trauma until the scene where she is raped by the decrepit dictator at the age of fourteen. This scene is the moment of most intense personal experience of the novel, the work’s most memorable moment, or what Vargas Llosa would identify as the “crater” of the reading experience. For many scholars and critics, the publication of La fiesta del Chivo represented Vargas Llosa’s return to his writing of the 1960s. Indeed, this voluminous novel about a dictator figure harkens back to Conversación en La Catedral. For Gene Bell-Villada, La fiesta del Chivo is a technical tour de force on a grand scale, a return to those vast “totalizing” novels of the 1960s.17 Bell-Villada asserts that Vargas Llosa takes an enormous risk by attempting to paint a dictator from up close, albeit in third person, yet succeeds in doing so with mastery and flair. Bell-Villada’s main point, however, is that the lifeblood of Flaubert—rebellion, vulgarity, violence, sex—is to be found in La fiesta del Chivo. Griffin also heralds the return to the dictator novel for Vargas Llosa, and later points out how the novel not only manipulates history, but also invites the reader to meditate on how much she can discover about the past, especially when it involves a dictator who controlled all sources of information.18 In addition, Griffin offers an incisive understanding of Vargas Llosa’s presentation of history in this novel: history does not follow a predetermined or logical course; rather, events are presented not as the inevitable outcome of rational causes, but as the result of such causality combined with chance and irrationality. I concur with this assessment, and would point out that this presentation of history was initially explored, perhaps to a lesser degree, in La guerra del fin del mundo (with emphasis on the irrationality), Historia de Mayta (chance and irrationality), and Lituma en los Andes (irrationality). The deliberately suppressive omniscient narrator in La fiesta del

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Chivo leaves the reader to resolve exactly what Urania’s return to Santo Domingo really means. She attempts to improve her state of mind by this encounter with her traumatic past, and seems to complete her stay with at least a better understanding of what had transpired. This twenty-first-century novel, as similar as it may appear to be to his total novels of the 1960s, also offers some novelties among Vargas Llosa’s work. Traumatized characters appear throughout his fiction, but this is the first time a major character, the protagonist, is a trauma victim and trauma is the primary subject of the novel. Finally, decades after being transfi xed by reading about a female protagonist created by Flaubert, Vargas Llosa had written his own Madame Bovary. «

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With El paraíso en la otra esquina, Vargas Llosa constructs a plot around a familiar structure, but as in Lituma en los Andes and La fiesta del Chivo, there are some new, twenty-first-century twists. This is a lengthy (485 pages in the original edition in Spanish) and reasonably complex novel consisting of twenty-two chapters. In this story of two historical characters, the Peruvian-French Flora Tristán and the French artist Paul Gauguin, Vargas Llosa once again employs the narrative strategy that he has successfully exploited since his early fiction—the communicating vessels. In El paraíso, the chapters alternate between Flora Tristán’s story and Paul Gauguin’s story, beginning with hers. In accordance with the strategy of the communicating vessels, one story line affects our understanding of the other, and vice versa. In the initial chapters, the characterization of Flora underscores her utopian social and political ideals as she articulates them in the early nineteenth century. She campaigns for workers’ rights and an egalitarian society, as well as equality for women. In the even-numbered chapters, Paul Gauguin initially seems to be the opposite, for he lives in the world of business. When he abandons his position in business for his passion— painting—he seems distant and divorced from the social world and, consequently, unrelated to Flora’s ideals. As Gauguin’s story unfolds, however, his passion for painting takes him to the island of Tahiti, where he attempts to construct not only a new, non-European life, but his own personal utopia of art and sex. In chapter 14, slightly more than midway in the novel, Gauguin is actively involved in local politics, and his fanatic campaign against Chinese immigration resounds of Flora’s campaigns

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several decades earlier. By this point in his life, at age fift y-two, Gauguin is becoming increasingly dedicated to mysticism, and his painting becomes progressively more mystic. This search for mystic experience is yet another form of utopia in the novel. In El paraíso en la otra esquina, Vargas Llosa also uses the technique of communicating vessels within individual chapters, moving back and forth between two settings, to enrich each other. For example, chapter 13, titled “La monja Gutiérrez,” begins with Flora Tristán in the French city of Toulon in 1844 but then, with an analepsis, the deliberately suppressive omniscient narrator moves quickly ten years back in time to Arequipa in southern Peru when she was there to witness, among other things, a civil war. Vargas Llosa achieves several effects with the use of this narrative technique. On the one hand, it underscores the similarities between nineteenth-century France and Latin America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The political chaos of nineteenthcentury France is comparable to the political chaos of Latin America in both centuries. The suspense created in the several story lines of La fiesta del Chivo was one of the novelist’s important achievements. Again in El paraíso en la otra esquina Vargas Llosa is using suspense to create and maintain reader interest. Vargas Llosa typically intensifies the drama as the plot develops, and in this novel, as in the two that follow, the presence of the sexual adds to this. Approximately three-quarters into the novel—in the sixteenth of twenty-two chapters—Vargas Llosa informs the reader that the natives of Marquis are more spontaneous and free than the Tahitians.19 In effect, Vargas Llosa is promising the reader more sex than in the previous chapters. In addition, the novel’s structure creates the expectation of the development and unfolding of an aesthetic pattern: as the novel progresses, the reader discovers an increasing number of connections between the narrative line of Flora Tristán’s story and the narrative line of Paul Gauguin’s. The initial parallels in the plot have to do with the respective sex lives of Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristán. In the novel’s early chapters, both characters experience violent, dysfunctional sexual experiences: Gauguin sodomizes an adolescent girl in Tahiti in chapter 2, and in chapter 3 Flora Tristán experiences her first sex with her husband, André Chazal, as a form of brutal and animalistic copulation. In general, however, the sexual experience of the two is developed through contrast—the use of opposites—and other aspects of their lives

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through similarity. Thus, Gauguin’s sexual activity is frequent and exuberant, as he engages in a series of sexual relations, throughout the novel, with adolescent girls. In most of the novel, Flora Tristán, by contrast, seemingly lives ignoring the sexual, rejecting potential suitors or sexual partners as if all were as brutish as her ex-husband. Eventually, Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristán come to share a common interest: gay sex. From his early experiences in Tahiti, Gauguin is interested in how the natives blur gender boundaries; in the fourth chapter, he observes a young boy whom the narrator describes as follows: “He was a male, close to that hazy boundary at which Tahitians became taota vahine, or androgenes, hermaphrodites, that third, in-between gender, which the Maori, unlike Europeans, still accepted among themselves with the naturalness of pagan civilizations, behind the backs of the missionaries and ministers.”20 In the novel’s early chapters, Flora Tristán avoids the topic of sex, even though some of the utopian thinkers whom she admires, such as Charles Fourier, articulate elaborate theories about how the sex lives of citizens should be organized in their ideal societies. Despite her avoidance of things sexual in her own personal life, she encourages a group of rebellious priests to break the celibacy rule (chapter 5). The sexual experiences of Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristán lead to parallel episodes of violence (early in the novel, chapter 6) in different times and places. Gauguin takes his lover Annahi on a trip to Bretagne (the Brittany region of France) and in the town of Pont-Aven they are violently assaulted by locals, who break Gauguin’s leg. In a flashback to her marriage with Chazal (in chapter 7), violence takes place when he attacks Flora Tristán verbally; she responds by hitting him with a ceramic plate, and then he physically abuses her. At the level of plot, the novel uses both stories to underline just how violent nineteenth-century French society was. In El paraíso en la otra esquina, the above-mentioned passage in which Chazal and Flora perform acts of violence against each other is one memorably intense moment, or crater, in this novel. This is a key passage in that it explains the depth of the trauma that Flora deals with over the remainder of her life; it does much to explain her feminism, which was pioneering and radical for the time. Finally, Vargas Llosa uses his technique of communicating vessels to tell two parallel stories of survival: Flora travels to Peru to recoup a supposed inheritance in an attempt to ensure her economic survival but fails to secure any funds, and thus is forced to live a precarious finan-

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cial life; Gauguin seemingly passes his entire life going from one financial crisis to another, and during most of his time in the Asian Pacific he scrapes by with very little money. By chapter 14, Gauguin looks much like Flora the political activist, calling a town meeting of the town council to discuss his imagined “invasion” of the Chinese. If Urania of La fiesta del Chivo was Vargas Llosa’s first Madame Bovary figure, Flora Tristán is his second. Now, in the twenty-first century, the writer who had been attacked as a misogynist when he published Pantaleón y las visitadoras is finally being associated closely with female figures, with whom he had aligned himself psychologically since his early twenties. On the surface, the aggressive and often masculine Flora Tristán might seem like a Madame Bovary figure. Tristán’s traumatic experience with domestic violence, however, and her distant subsequent relationship with her brutish husband make her more obviously comparable to Madame Bovary. As in Lituma en los Andes, in El paraíso Vargas Llosa makes use of his well-rehearsed modernist strategies, including tightly conceived structures based on principles of communicating vessels, but not rigidly so. In these two twenty-first-century novels, Vargas Llosa eschews the rigidly organized and predictable structures of novels such as La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral (on which topic see part III). This is the twenty-first-century novelist with his high modernist project, who has written through the postmodern and whose modernism is tempered in Lituma en los Andes and El paraíso en la otra esquina. In these two novels, Vargas Llosa is in the process of rethinking his utopian ideals of earlier years. In Lituma en los Andes, he presents the horrific results of the armed guerrilla warfare initiated in the 1960s. In El paraíso, Vargas Llosa is more explicitly critical of the very roots of utopian thought in the nineteenth century. His ridicule of Flora is a critique of all twentieth-century utopians, from the international Left to Latin America’s armed guerrilla groups, to himself as a former supporter of these groups. «

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In the novel Travesuras de la niña mala Vargas Llosa offers a variety of plots for his different types of readers. In this sense, as one of his entertainments, Travesuras is a throwback to La tía Julia y el escribidor, with its complex set of readers and writers implied in the text. To some degree, much of Vargas Llosa’s writing is about readers and writers, and

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Travesuras is among the works that deal with this topic most directly and elaborately. This is a novel without an omniscient narrator of any sort. For the reader of commercial literature (and Vargas Llosa has sold several of his entertainments in the mass markets of commercial literature), Travesuras can be read as a love story, albeit a pathetic one. In this story, the narrator-protagonist, Ricardo Somocurcio, falls madly in love with an adolescent girl, who uses multiple names from when the two of them are adolescents, and throughout their adult lives. Ricardothe-adolescent lives in the upper-middle-class Miraflores neighborhood of Lima, and there meets the even younger adolescent “Chilean” girl (as she first identifies herself), who charms him and all of his peers with her coquettish ways and her cute Chilean accent. This initial adolescent crush ends with an entertaining surprise at the end of the first chapter: the supposed Chilean girl is not really of Chilean nationality at all, nor does she actually live in ritzy Miraflores: she comes from a working-class neighborhood of Lima and is Peruvian. Then the plot jumps forward in time to Paris, where Ricardo is beginning to see his lifelong dream enacted, for he has the opportunity to live in the French capital. He works as a translator and soon encounters, by chance, the now–young adult who was the coquettish adolescent “Chilean” in Miraflores. Now, however, she self-identifies as a “revolutionary” on her way to Havana, via Paris, to learn armed guerrilla warfare tactics in Cuba. In her first of several opportunistic marriages, she weds a Cuban diplomat, thus affording herself not only an improved material life, but access to the upper range of the social order in Paris. During this still relatively early period of their respective lives and relationship, Ricardo already recognizes a key issue for the development of the plot: it is both his good fortune and his bad luck that he would always love this woman, the Chilean now disguised as an upper-class Peruvian in Paris. In the late 1960s (about the time, in real history, of the 1968 military coup of General Velasco, which overthrew the government of Belaúnde Terry), she steals funds from her husband’s bank accounts and disappears from Paris. At this point in the novel (chapter 3), the political revolution in Paris and Latin America becomes less interesting for Ricardo than the cultural revolution in the London of the late 1960s. (In this sense, the seemingly “apolitical” Ricardo is something of a utopian.) Thus, he begins frequent stays in Great Britain, while at the same time maintaining his permanent residence in France. In London he connects with an old friend from Peru and, in turn, with the Bad Girl, who has once again mutated, and manages to present herself to British society, convincingly, as an upper-class

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Mexican. In a week-long return to his sexual relationship with the Bad Girl in London, Ricardo lives what he claims to be the happiest days of his life. Vargas Llosa pushes the limits of credibility of the plot (even for a piece with little pretension of being anything beyond entertainment), creating one of the novel’s most memorable moments—an intense crater—in chapter 4. Here the Peruvian Bad Girl is in Japan, living with a unique and wealthy Japanese entrepreneur, Fakuda, who uses her for his sexual pleasure, as a voyeur, by having her perform sexual scenes merely for the sake of his pleasure in observing. Ricardo manages to somehow locate her in Japan and has an apparently passionate sexual encounter with her (an intense crater), only to realize, at the end, that the real pleasure was neither his nor the Bad Girl’s, but the voyeur’s, for the whole scene had been orchestrated by him. Back in Paris, in chapter 5, Ricardo-the-narrator relates two stories. At this point, Ricardo is feeling old at the age of forty-seven, and he tells the story of two recoveries from childhood trauma. On the one hand, he tells the story of yet another of Vargas Llosa’s traumatized characters— a young mute boy who cannot speak because of his trauma. By means of therapy, he does eventually speak, uttering sentences in Spanish and French, and later learning English when the family moves to New Jersey. On the other hand, the Bad Girl, now an aging senior citizen in Paris, receives therapeutic treatment for her trauma in the form of psychiatric analysis. She relates to Ricardo, who now confesses that she is the great love of his life, more details of her recent life: she had been imprisoned in Lagos in the next stage of her identity change, and she had initially claimed to have been raped in prison. As her story from Japan and Lagos develops more, however, it becomes apparent that she is still suffering the trauma of her sexual relationship with Fakuda, who had destroyed her psychologically in Japan, through a variety of forms of exotic sexual abuse. In Paris, and in a seemingly miraculous transformation, she assumes a more intimate role than ever with Ricardo, now approaching him, for the first time, with the desire only to have a relationship exclusively with him. With her aging and growing self-awareness, the Bad Girl discovers a facet of her personality that has interested Vargas Llosa throughout his career: the value of intense personal experience (or what Franco has also called “privatized experience”). The Bad Girl states that by living life as she has chosen (a bizarre series of events with multiple personalities), she experiences it more “intensely.”21 With her aging, her newfound self-

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awareness, and her new closeness with Ricardo, he finds her beautiful in a different way, unlike the raw sexual attraction of before. Now, he perceives a new “stability” in her and a “permanence” that he had never felt before. With her aging, she even appears to Ricardo to be timeless. On the surface, the relationship between Ricardo and the Bad Girl seems to be finally reaching a maturity heretofore unattainable: they have discovered a new intimacy and Ricardo has discovered a new beauty in her old age. Nevertheless, at the end of chapter 5, once again, as always, she disappears. In the novel’s final two chapters, some of the mystery of the Bad Girl’s persona unravels. In a trip to Lima, Ricardo learns of her true socioeconomic background. Her real name was Otilia, and she had been reared in impoverished shantytowns in Lima’s port of Callao. Back in Europe, but now in Madrid, Ricardo loses the Bad Girl one last time. She and Ricardo had married, but she could not tolerate the “routine” and “mediocrity” of the marriage. At the end of the novel, Ricardo encounters the now-aged, decrepit Bad Girl in a café in the working-class Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid. Filled with the violence and entertaining plot line of the novel of chivalry, as well as numerous sex scenes, Travesuras de la niña mala is Vargas Llosa’s most elaborate and accomplished entertainment. This is perhaps because, on the surface, it shares so many qualities with his entertainments of the 1970s (Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor)—above all, the light humor. Nevertheless, this twentyfirst-century novel explores more human perversity than any of the earlier entertainments. It is also one of Vargas Llosa’s most enigmatic and intriguing works. In a provocative reading of this novel, Efraín Kristal suggests that “it becomes a meditation on the effects of trauma.”22 He makes this observation in the context of the Bad Girl’s extremely impoverished childhood and the sexual violence that she suffered while living in squalor. Kristal’s follow-up to this reading of Travesuras de la niña mala as a meditation on trauma is that “this theme offers a key to Vargas Llosa’s entire ouevre.”23 Indeed, this novel plays out obsessively Vargas Llosa’s traumas in ways closer and deeper to the author’s own psyche than perhaps any of his other works. Both main characters, Ricardo and the Bad Girl, are often distant alter egos of Vargas Llosa, and sometimes surprisingly close to the writer himself. Among the superficial similarities, Ricardo lives in Lima, Paris, London, and Madrid at approximately the same times that Vargas Llosa did. Ricardo’s observations about political events in Peru, from afar,

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thus correspond to Vargas Llosa’s own life experience, covering a period roughly from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. In the twenty-first century, Vargas Llosa writes more closely and more openly to his own trauma. When Vargas Llosa lived in Paris, writing La ciudad y los perros and La casa verde, his economic survival depended to a large degree on teaching and translation. Of course, these were also years in which Mario Vargas Llosa was a visible public intellectual on the Left, publishing essays in defense of armed leftist guerrillas and the Cuban Revolution, and in defense of individuals associated with these causes. In Paris and in Caracas, Vargas Llosa took public stances defending these causes. His literary alter ego, Ricardo, on the other hand, is seemingly “apolitical.”24 As a reader and translator of literature, and professional translator in general, he lives a life in Paris similar to Vargas Llosa’s imaginary life if he never had become a professional writer in Paris. Thus, the Vargas Llosa reader is left to observe and speculate, as Vargas Llosa has in several essays, about the mediocre life of the failed Peruvian and Latin American writer. Ricardo also shares with Vargas Llosa an escape into a special complex world. One of Ricardo’s most difficult undertakings, as a translator, is the study of the Russian language, a metaphor for Vargas Llosa’s parallel exercise in complexity—the construction of La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral in the 1960s. For Ricardo, this entrance into the intricate linguistic and cultural world of the Russian language and literature is comparable to Vargas Llosa’s psychological survival in Paris by delving into not the hermetic Russian language, but the complex novels that he wrote. Many of these parallels between Ricardo and Mario Vargas Llosa— two characters fully enthusiastic about living in Paris in the 1960s—are relatively obvious. To think of the Bad Girl as an alter ego of the author Mario Vargas Llosa, however, is less obvious, and initially counterintuitive. Only this type of thinking will lead the reader to a full understanding, however, of Kristal’s well-conceived observation that Travesuras is really a meditation on trauma. Both Mario Vargas Llosa and the Bad Girl were victims of trauma, as children, in circumstances beyond their control. In both cases, they compensate for a world that they find unbearable (or “insufficient,” to use Vargas Llosa’s term) by creating lies and fictions. Vargas Llosa, in essays and interviews, often refers to fictions as lies; the Bad Girl lies constantly to create fictions that she

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plays out not by means of creative writing, but as an actress who lives the dramas and melodramas that she creates. Her cruelty is simply her way of surviving in a world that she perceives, as a traumatized victim, as a chaotic jungle from which she obsessively attempts to escape by means of her erotic encounters and cruelty. Vargas Llosa’s chaotic jungle is the Amazon jungle of Peru that he evokes repeatedly in his fiction, from La casa verde through El hablador to El sueño del celta, in novels that, eventually, lead the characters either to their death within the jungle (Fushía) or to find harmony in the jungle (Saúl) or out of the jungle (many of his other characters). Vargas Llosa the author, of course, has also played the Bad Girl’s role in his personal and political life in Latin America as a kind of “bad boy.” As an adolescent, he was the “bad boy” of his family who eloped with his aunt, contrary to his parents’ wishes, and married her. Then, as the political rebel and revolutionary, he was the Peruvian “bad boy” of the 1960s. Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, he was the Latin American “bad boy” among leftist intellectuals in Latin America, of whom he was publicly critical. Thus, in many ways throughout his life, Vargas Llosa has been, in his way, the intellectual and writer who has played out much of the role of the Bad Girl in Travesuras. What the male writer and the female character share in their background is childhood abuse and trauma. On the surface, Travesuras might itself be considered one of the most “apolitical” of the author’s novels. The sometimes politically simplistic and often politically indifferent Ricardo, after all, has only two real passions (and neither is politics): the Bad Girl and Paris. Thus, Kristal’s assertion that Ricardo is “apolitical” has some validity. Nevertheless, there are some political elements to this novel. The appearance of the Bad Girl early in the novel, preparing to be trained in Cuba as a guerrilla fighter, exposes one ugly side of some political activity, including on the left: blatant and cheap opportunism. As minor as this anecdote in the life of the Bad Girl may be, it represents Vargas Llosa’s political critique. In reality, Ricardo is essentially a utopian, but weak and ineffective in actualizing any of his utopian desires. A sympathizer of his politically active Peruvian friends, he sits passively in Paris, too enthralled with his imagined Paris—still very much an addict to Benjamin’s Paris as cultural capital of Europe, even though Ricardo has not read The Arcades Project. Less a totally apolitical being, Ricardo is an indifferent, weak political being. For example, he is strongly attracted to the cultural revolution centered in London in the late 1960s, but would never think seri-

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ously of actually joining this revolution any more than he was capable of giving up his romanticized Paris for guerrilla life in Peru. Ricardo is something of a utopian, but a failed utopian. «

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El sueño del celta (2010) is Vargas Llosa’s revisiting, some four decades later, of some of the issues and settings initially explored in La casa verde, as well as in El paraíso en la otra esquina. It is the fift h of Vargas Llosa’s twenty-first-century meditations on trauma. The novel deals with the European use of slaves and the colonial presence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Africa and Latin America. In La casa verde, Vargas Llosa had used two settings—the Amazon jungle and Piura—to tell what became, in the end, one story; in El sueño del celta, the settings in the Congo and the Putumayo region all become part of a larger picture of European colonization in the Congo, Peru, and Ireland. It is the story of the historical figure Roger Casement, whose travels and adventures are the focus of the plot. A novel completed and in press when the Nobel Prize announcement came forth on October 7, 2010, this is the fift h of Vargas Llosa’s ambitious and lengthy (454 page) total novels, after La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral, La guerra del fin del mundo, and La fiesta del Chivo. El sueño del celta consists of an epigraph and four parts identified in the text as “The Congo” (El Congo), “Amazonia” (La Amazonía), “Ireland” (Irlanda), and an “Epilogue” (Epílogo). As an emissary of Great Britain, Casement travels to the Congo and to the Amazon region to investigate claims of human rights abuses, particularly of workers in the rubber industry in the Congo and the Peruvian Amazon. Years later, upon returning to Ireland, Casement becomes a leader in the growing nationalist movement toward autonomy and independence in Ireland. An enigmatic political figure, Casement becomes even more controversial in early twentieth-century England, a period when homosexuality was a serious social stigma. El sueño del celta opens with an epigraph citing a text by the turnof-the-century Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó, Motivos de Proteo: “Each one of us is, successively, not one but many. And these successive personalities that emerge one from the other tend to present the strangest, most astonishing contrasts among themselves.”25 This quote from Rodó is a kind of theory of human personality that

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appears in several of Vargas Llosa’s novels, but underlies in a consistent and significant way La casa verde, El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, and El sueño del celta. In La casa verde, Bonifacia is an innocent and fearful adolescent native American in the Amazon; in the city of Piura, she is a seemingly different person and personality, and in Piura she is not known as Bonifacia, but rather as “Wildflower” (“La Selvática”). Similarly, the character whom we know as Lituma, a military figure in the Amazon, is the Sergeant in Piura. In Vargas Llosa’s fiction, human character is not stable and fi xed, but fluid and changing according to the social milieu. The problematic and ambiguous figure of Roger Casement does not undergo name changes in El sueño del celta, but he is even less fi xed in identity than those changed names—from Bonifacia of La casa verde to Koké in El paraíso en la otra esquina and the Bad Girl in Travesuras. In the region then known as the Belgian Congo, Casement is the young and idealist diplomat assigned as the British consul in the city of Boma. In the novel’s second and third parts, Casement’s identity mutates into that of the experienced rational human being and highly respected diplomat in the Amazon region; then near the end of the novel, in Europe, he is portrayed as less rational and the fanatic nationalist. Brief allusions to his sexuality in the early parts of the novel become direct descriptions of gay encounters in the latter parts of the work. After the opening epigraph, the novel’s first of four parts, “The Congo,” consists of 124 pages (pages 13 to 137 in Spanish) and contains seven chapters. The first chapter, identified with Roman numeral “I,” is the briefest chapter of the novel, consisting of a five-page (pages 13 to 17) introduction to Roger Casement, not in the Congo (as indicated in the title, “El Congo”) but in Pentonville Prison in Great Britain. The basic “present” of this “Congo” section is late nineteenth-century Congo; this first chapter is a prolepsis to 1916 England, where Roger Casement pleads for clemency in the face of execution for treason. His diaries, containing scandalous anecdotes of supposed gay encounters with young boys, are circulating in the public sphere. This chapter in Pentonville Prison is the direct forerunner of the novel’s last chapter, in which Casement is executed for having collaborated with the Germans in World War I and actively campaigning to create an Irish Brigade among prisoners held in Germany to attack England. The remainder of part I alternates between the Congo and Pentonville Prison. Chapter 2 begins with Roger Casement awaiting his death in Pentonville Prison, but then moves back in time to his childhood.

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From this point in chapter 2 the novel develops in a generally linear fashion to cover Casement’s life. Born in 1864 in the suburbs of Dublin, he was reared with three older siblings in the Anglican Church of Ireland, even though his mother was Catholic. One of Vargas Llosa’s lifetime “demons” (demonios), the Catholic church, appears intermittently throughout the novel and at the end, as he faces his hanging. Casement converts to Catholicism. Vargas Llosa portrays Casement’s father as a strong figure, in several ways similar to his own father, Ernesto Vargas. Both are adventuresome men who travel to far-off places. In the case of Ernesto Vargas, he traveled from Peru to Argentina, where he joined the merchant marines. Casement’s father liked to read books about distant and exotic places, and served as a captain in the military mission in Afghanistan. Casement’s childhood, as described in chapter 2, was traumatic: he lost his mother at the age of nine, an age similar to when Mario Vargas Llosa symbolically lost his mother to his returning father. Casement’s loss is described as an extremely difficult and traumatic one; then, at age twelve, he lost his father to tuberculosis, leaving the young boy an orphan. After the loss of his parents, Casement’s youth, according to Vargas Llosa’s fictional account, is strikingly similar to Vargas Llosa’s: Casement lived in solitude and isolated himself in his own private world of literature and fantasy, reading books about distant, exotic places and writing poetry. Struck by the story of Livingston’s disappearance in Africa, however, Casement abandoned school at the age of fifteen to join the merchant marines. At the end of chapter 2, Casement departs for Africa on a mission to “modernize” it. Chapter 3 returns to the original setting of chapter 1: Roger Casement is in Pentonville Prison facing death for treason while debates over the morality of the death penalty are raging in London. As Casement receives a visit from his cousin Gee, he reflects on the irony of the fact that he had once favored the death penalty for the Peruvian rubber baron Julio César Arana. In his final days, he is a pathetic and obsessive character who writes poetry to provide solace in this dismal and demoralizing setting. As his life ends, he is portrayed as a radical nationalist, obviously not a position that Vargas Llosa views in a positive way. Roger Casement begins his life as an adventurer in chapter 4, assuming his duties in Boma. Casement meets Henry Morton Stanley. In the Congo, Casement observes European colonial efforts at imposing postEnlightenment European “progress,” and the schemes to convert the Af-

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rican “barbarians” (“bárbaros”) into “modern” and “educated” human beings (“seres modernos e instruídos”).26 Casement’s African experience in the Congo is completed in chapters 5, 6, and 7 of the novel. In chapter 5 the reader sees Vargas Llosa revealing Casement’s interactions with European celebrity intellectuals such as Joseph Conrad and W.  B. Yeats. While he is a prisoner of the British government, Casement’s case gains the attention of Irish intellectuals such as Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, and Robert Cunningham Graham. In some ways, the reader cannot resist the observation that Vargas Llosa would be sympathetic to Casement: a wellintentioned, progressive intellectual of his times, and lifetime crusader against the abuse of power who ends up being politically defamed in the local press and fundamentally abandoned by many of the most prominent writers of his time. The basic situation of Casement in the Pentonville Prison offers several parallels to Vargas Llosa’s life of that twodecade period from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s when, after being a highly visible public intellectual on the Left, he was the most harshly criticized of the writers of the Boom by the Left. The sixth chapter of El sueño del celta is a flashback to Casement’s Congo experience, and his perception of the imbecility of the world (“imbecilidad del mundo” [El sueño, 88]). This is Casement’s opinion, but, again, the Vargas Llosa reader cannot resist hearing the double voice of Vargas Llosa’s essays in which he uses some of the same language about some intellectuals. In this chapter, which takes place in the Congo in 1903–1904, Casement begins to establish the connections between the colonial status of the Congo and the colonial status of Ireland, connections that will, in the end, lead to his demise. In the early twentieth century, then, Casement begins his transformation to a nationalist, a change that Vargas Llosa would consider ill-conceived. For the Peruvian writer, nationalism is a mistaken form of identity for world citizens from all nations. The last section of the first part, chapter 7, ends in Pentonville Prison once again. Casement has reached a psychological state in which he is focusing on the “stupidity” (“estupidez”) of “human nature” (“la naturaleza humana”) (El sueño, 137). As he becomes increasingly aware of his imminent death, he views life in general as a “trap” (trampa) (El sueño, 137). The roots of part II of El sueño del celta, “Amazonía,” go back to La casa verde and Vargas Llosa’s 1958 trip to the Amazon. It was during this

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trip that Vargas Llosa discovered and first directly experienced the part of Peru that served as a setting for La casa verde and for part II of El sueño del celta: the Peruvian Amazon jungle and the exploitation of natural resources (rubber) and human beings (indigenous peoples) in the early twentieth century by the Peruvian magnate Julio César Arana. In the first chapter of part II, Casement arrives in 1910 in the major city of the Amazon basin, Iquitos. In this chapter, however, the narrator also takes us back to Ireland and the rise of Irish nationalism in the early twentieth century. He recounts, for example, the 1904 founding of Sinn Féin by Arthur Griffith. When Casement arrives in the region, he leads a commission on behalf of the British government to investigate allegations of ill-treatment and abuse by Arana’s bi-national British-Peruvian company. Casement first discovers that Arana is the de facto leader of the region—a caudillo figure to whom local government officials, such as the prefect, report. Casement also experiences life in the jungle as “barbarism” (barbarie), given the multiple forums of “barbarism” that he observes in the Amazon under the rule of Arana. As in La casa verde and as in the history of much of Latin America to varying degrees, the caudillo works in collaboration with the government and the Church. In El sueño del celta, Father Urrutia collaborates with the government in covering up crimes against the indigenous people. A writer figure, Benjamin Saldaña Roca, appears in chapter 8 and denounces Arana’s exploitive operation in the newspaper Truth in 1909. One result of this investigative reporting is that the writer is kidnapped, tied up, and thrown into a river to be devoured by piranhas. Another writer figure Vargas Llosa reinvents is a North American engineer, Walter Hardenburg, who also writes against the abuses in the Amazon. In this chapter the reader discovers a situation in the Peruvian Amazon of the early twentieth century that is a mirror image of what had been seen in the African Congo: the systematic use and abuse of slaves by rubber barons in Africa is identical to the system of slavery operated by the rubber baron in Peru. The juxtaposition of these two slave stories represents Vargas Llosa’s use of communicating vessels: each story is enhanced by the presence of the other; the presence of the two stories makes a larger, more universal statement than the telling of only one local case of abuse might achieve. By the end of chapter 8, the reader, like Roger Casement, is exhausted by the depth and breadth of human abuse as it is depicted in Africa and Latin America in the early twentieth century. Vargas Llosa’s approach to the total novel and to violence is comparable in many ways to

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the experience of the total novel in Latin America since the 1960s, from García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 in the twenty-first century. The second chapter of the Amazonía section in El sueño del celta, chapter 9, moves forward in time: the reader is transported from the Peruvian Amazon to Pentonville Prison in London. At this point, El sueño del celta is firmly historical, with references to the Irish uprising of April 21, 1916, and the series of events involving Casement’s work with the German government to secure arms for the Irish nationalists. Along with La guerra del fin del mundo and La fiesta del Chivo, this is one of Vargas Llosa’s most historically based novels. In chapter 9 Vargas Llosa delves more deeply into the complex and controversial personality of Roger Casement. While in prison, he embraces Catholicism at the same time that he experiences gay sexual fantasies related to sexual practices prohibited by the Church of the time. While in prison, he realizes his own innocence in trusting as many people as he had during his espionage scheme of working with Irish nationalists and the German army to secure arms for the nationalists. Perhaps his most innocent error was trusting his Norwegian colleague, Eivind, the person who had betrayed him to the British authorities. «

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Critical reception of El sueño del celta has been generally positive and has suggested ways in which this novel represents both continuity and novelty in Vargas Llosa’s total work. In her review of this novel, Liesl Schillinger delineates Vargas Llosa’s two chief modes of writing: “serious politico-historical novels” like La fiesta del Chivo and La guerra del fin del mundo and “sensual picaresques” like La tía Julia y el escribidor and Travesuras de la niña mala.27 According to this characterization of Vargas Llosa’s work, El sueño del celta clearly would be considered among those “serious” political-historical works. As a point of departure for discussing Vargas Llosa’s fiction, Schillinger’s dichotomy can be useful. I would maintain, however, that novels such as Travesuras de la niña mala and Pantaleón de las visitadoras are, indeed, “serious” works making important contributions to the sociopolitical dialogue in Peru and Latin America. Following Schillinger’s line of thought, then, I would distinguish between Vargas Llosa’s totalizing modernist project, which includes El sueño del celta, La fiesta del Chivo, La guerra del fin del mundo, Conversación en La Catedral, and La casa verde and the anti-totalizing

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entertainments, which includes the novels Travesuras de la niña mala, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, La tía Julia y el escribidor, and Pantaleón y las visitadoras. The five latter can be read as light entertainments, but in all cases they also offer a “serious” thematic engagement for the reader. Among these totalizing modernist novels, El sueño del celta is, indeed, his most serious political-historical work, and one of his most heavily historically documented novels. Beginning with Conrad’s abundant writing on Casement, Vargas Llosa used a substantive series of studies on Casement, as well as additional materials on the Irish uprising against the British during World War I.28 The result of this thorough research is a novel with encyclopedic detail; Schillinger also notes Vargas Llosa’s encyclopedic impulse: the action is organized by biographical milestones and itineraries, encyclopedically recapitulating Casement’s observations about “indescribable cruelties” which, as Schillinger correctly notes, Vargas Llosa describes effectively.29 This then is Vargas Llosa the totalizing modernist whose efforts in this direction began in the 1960s with La casa verde. The differences between La casa verde and El sueño del celta are also noteworthy. Both novels use the Amazon basin as one important setting, and a significant socioeconomic context for both works is the rubber industry of this region. In both cases, detailed descriptions of the jungle environment are provided by a novelist who characteristically shows the reader the minute details of each physical setting. Beyond these basic similarities, however, there are important differences. The most important difference is the historical detail offered in El sueño del celta. In La casa verde, the rubber industry is a background presence to Jum’s torture and related events, but without the historical details of the rubber industry ever being explained in the text. The reader is left to speculate, and in some ways the jungle setting is more mythical (in the Faulknerian mode) than historical. Now, in the twenty-first century, Vargas-Llosa-the-researcher leaves the mythical Faulknerian mode behind and directly unravels the ugly historical details of the rubber industry in the Amazon and in Africa. This encyclopedic style is also the impulse of the total novel unleashed. The twenty-first-century writer of the encyclopedic total novel no longer feels the need to be “universal” in the Faulknerian sense. For Efraín Kristal, El sueño del celta offered Vargas Llosa the opportunity to “revisit the theme of transgression” from a perspective consistent with the writer’s “new conciliatory mood.”30 Kristal points out that the narrative frame of the novel is the relationship between Case-

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ment and his prison guard. Despite their opposing convictions on everything from politics to sexuality, the two men realize they share a sense of fatalism. Kristal points out that, in the end, Casement and the guard eventually are both stripped of their respective convictions, and left with a shared sense of emptiness.31 Life had lost its meaning for the guard when his son died fighting the Germans, and the jailer confesses that he almost committed suicide. For Kristal, Casement has become a nihilist who embraces no causes. Tellingly, Casement’s conversion to Catholicism near the end is similar to his experiences as a human rights activist and as a nationalist, for he rejects the meaningfulness of all three. After reviewing Vargas Llosa’s fictionalization of Gauguin and Flora Tristán in El paraíso en la otra esquina and of Casement in El sueño del celta, Kristal concludes that Vargas Llosa’s most recent novels share in the assumption that the sources of human dissatisfaction with the here and now are intractable; that evil is a real preserve, generating a need for reconciliation among flawed human beings, an opening to love; and that transgression and rebellion are preconditions for spiritual intimations. Kristal also maintains that the “power” of Vargas Llosa’s fiction lies in its ability to “keep his readers unsettled by the imperfections of our world and riveted by the literary imagination, whether or not it can compensate for the insufficiencies of the here and now.”32 This informed reading by Kristal might be overreading with respect to the “love” and “spiritual intimations,” both of which are concepts articulated by fictional characters but more difficult to ascribe to the writer Mario Vargas Llosa. In reality, in the totality of Vargas Llosa’s twentyfirst-century work, “love,” “spiritual intimations,” and the like are more negative than Kristal seems to imply. Vargas Llosa, although changed in some ways in the twenty-first century, is still skeptical. In the end, neither Gauguin, Flora, the Bad Girl, nor Casement are convincingly loving or spiritually motivated characters. The reader is left to question, for example, exactly what motivates them. Kristal is more on the mark when referring to the “insufficiencies” that Vargas Llosa constantly and consistently sees in life, as noted in novels, essays, and interviews. In El sueño del celta and Vargas Llosa’s twenty-first-century writing in general, however, he has been consistent on this matter: reading and writing of literature are indeed the vehicles for dealing with the insufficiencies of life. Throughout his essays, and culminating in his Nobel lecture, Vargas Llosa makes this point often. In the conclusion of his Nobel lecture, he states: “That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have

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found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility” (“Por eso tenemos que seguir soñando, leyendo y escribiendo, la más eficaz manera que hayamos encontrado de aliviar nuestra condición perecedera, de derrotar a la carcoma del tiempo y de convertir en posible lo imposible”).

Conclusion In these five twenty-first-century novels the reader encounters a major modernist writer and a trauma victim. One of Vargas Llosa’s central interests is the complexity of human beings as individuals and as a part of collectives we call “society” and the “nation.” In El sueño del celta this complexity of the individual human being is evoked initially in the quotation from Rodó: “Each one of us is, successively, not one but many.” This basic idea has been a virtual credo for Vargas Llosa since the 1960s—a cornerstone of La casa verde—but never before had the author taken one historical character and dedicated an entire novel to the exploration of this concept and this character. In this sense, El sueño del celta is a first and special type of novel in Vargas Llosa’s oeuvre. Conversación en La Catedral has the historical figure of Odría as an important character, and La fiesta del Chivo has Trujillo as a prominent one. In neither novel, however, is the admittedly important historical figure the main focus: in Conversación en La Catedral Odría is a shadowy background force that affects the actual protagonist, Santiago Zavala, and a plethora of other characters, in a negative way. In La fiesta del Chivo, Trujillo is more present and developed than Odría, but the protagonist is actually Urania, the one who suffers the most from the abusive power of the regime. With El sueño del celta, for the first time in Vargas Llosa’s work, the historical figure is both the central figure and the protagonist, who is also the most developed character. In this significant way the twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa distinguishes himself from the twentieth-century authors of the Boom. Indeed, Roger Casement embodies the complexities and ambiguities that make him the ideal material for a modernist writer such as Vargas Llosa to explore, interrogate, and, eventually, reinvent. For this task of re-creating his fictional Roger Casement, Vargas Llosa exploits a full range of his well-practiced strategies. The major strategy, as briefly discussed, is the use of communicating vessels: Casement is presented in an external manner in his geographical settings of Africa, Latin Amer-

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ica, and Europe; he is presented internally in Pentonville Prison. In the external mode, the omniscient narrator, functioning as the deliberately suppressive narrator, is effective in deliberately not clarifying the ambiguities that are necessary for the text. This applies to the case of Roger Casement’s sexual orientation and his actual sexual behavior. Given the lack of a fully omnicommunicative omniscient narrator, the reader can never fully ascertain what Casement’s sexual orientation is and, even more so, to what degree his highly erotic encounters with young boys might be “real” (within the context of the “real” of the fictional world of El sueño del celta). Even more external and distant than the deliberately suppressive omniscient narrator are the multiple characters and texts that contribute to the characterization of Casement. The various intellectuals and nationalists who embrace Casement’s personal and nationalistic cause or distance themselves from it, for example, provide an external view of Casement as a social human being. One of the most intriguing anecdotes of the novel, in this context, is the behavior of Joseph Conrad, a writer who had befriended Casement in the Congo, who seemed to support his lifetime human rights campaign, but who inexplicably declined the opportunity to support Casement when he was facing the death sentence. In some passages, Vargas Llosa employs a narrative style learned from Flaubert—free indirect style—in which the narrator is technically in third person, but imitates the language and thought of characters, usually Casement. These five twenty-first-century novels are among Vargas Llosa’s most engaging and compelling books for several reasons. First, at this stage in his fiction-writing career, this fundamentally and deeply modernist novelist writes in a manner still tempered by his lifelong modernist project and postmodern exercises, but in ways beyond standard modernism. That is, he resists the need to be as systematic and rigid, the temptation to be flashy with narrative technique, and the tendency to be extremely complex. In this sense, by the twenty-first century this Nobel laureate is truly a modern master. Second, Vargas Llosa creates strong plots, as well as compelling and memorable scenes in each of these five novels, scenes that he would identify as “craters.” These are elements of Vargas Llosa’s privileging of individual, private experience both for his characters and for his readers. Franco discusses the lack of sense of comunitas; Vargas Llosa maintains that the act of telling a story of deeply personal experience is essential to being human. As a lengthy meditation on trauma, these five novels go

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to the core of human experience on an individual level. In these twentyfirst-century novels, Vargas Llosa fictionalizes a series of traumatized characters unlike any of his twentieth-century portrayals: three women (Urania, Flora, the Bad Girl) and a sexually ambiguous but probably gay male (Roger Casement). In the twenty-first century, as suggested earlier, Vargas Llosa writes the closest to his own trauma and more openly about it than he ever had before. Third, Vargas Llosa explores complex feelings, themes, and political debates, now after decades of not only writing fiction, but also acting in the political sphere as a public intellectual. In this sphere, his five twenty-first-century novels are noteworthy components of the total work of a public intellectual who, like Fuentes and García Márquez, has an overriding belief that the exercise of literature and culture still plays a positive role in progressive change in society. If an implicit belief in postEnlightenment Anglo-American society is that reason, education, and science are cornerstones for human progress, for Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and García Márquez these foundations are to be found in literature and culture. More specifically, Vargas Llosa offers reasons in these novels to be relatively optimistic and pessimistic about the power and efficacy of human reason, imaginative literature (“creative writing”), and culture (i.e., “high culture”). Novels such as Lituma en los Andes and El sueño del celta certainly offer reasons to be pessimistic; the main characters at the end of both of these novels might appropriately be described as nihilists. In addition, the main characters in El paraíso and Travesuras, in the end, are pathetic. In the face of the setbacks, defeats, and even deaths of so many key characters, Vargas Llosa offers not exactly hope or optimism. Rather, traumatized and suffering human beings, such as Urania, the Bad Girl, and Roger Casement survive by means of storytelling.

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Part III

Rereading Vargas Llosa

A

ll 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 twentyfirst 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 selfparody. 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

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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 im-

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portance 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

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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 noteworthy 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 Ti-

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rant 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

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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—

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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 Marito’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

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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

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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 fift h 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

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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 evennumbered 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 en-

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tertained 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.”

Tr auma 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.

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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

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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

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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 litera-

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ture 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.

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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 hy-

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perbolic 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 soledad, 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 booklength studies offer commentary on nature and ecology in Cien años de soledad or make allusions to them. Gene H. Bell-Villada’s book García

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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 soledad. 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.

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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 sub-

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ject 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.

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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 dia-

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logue on the global environment in general and ecocritical literary criticism specifically. La casa verde leads the reader away from the traditional anthrocentered 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 postEnlightenment 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

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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

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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 swift ly 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 narratornovelist. 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

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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 worldview 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 juxtaposition of chapters in this novel brings into conflict the oral and written modes of storytelling and their corresponding worldviews.23 Chapters 3,

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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 narratorstoryteller 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.”

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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-middleclass 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

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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

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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

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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 Kafka 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

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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, Leafstorm), 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

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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

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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.

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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 reso-

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nance 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

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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 fi xes 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 heteroglossia 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

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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 sen-

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tence (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

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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 San-

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tiago 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

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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

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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

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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 “postindustrial” 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 po-

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litical 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,

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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 fi xed 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 groundbreaking 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

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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 postmodern 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

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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

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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. Postmodern 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

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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 postmodern 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. Var-

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gas 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.

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Epilogue

T

he great adventure” is what Mario Vargas Llosa called his trip to Stockholm when he boarded the plane in Madrid on a rainy Sunday afternoon on December 5, 2010. He was about to leave on a flight to Sweden in order to begin a week of activities that would culminate in his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had participated in two conferences in Stockholm before, and this was his third professional trip to that city, and the most important. Once in Stockholm that Sunday evening, he and Patricia checked into the classic Malmö. Within an hour after their arrival, the newest Nobel laureate and his wife were on their way to dine at a traditional Swedish restaurant, Den Gyldene Freden, specialist in traditional Scandinavian food since 1922 and the same establishment in which a group of Swedish academics had met every Thursday evening to discuss the Nobel Prize. Along with Mario and Patricia, present at the dinner were his son Álvaro, his daughter Morgana, the Peruvian painter and confidant Fernando de Szyszlo, his wife, and one representative of the Nobel Committee. The day before this trip to Sweden, Vargas Llosa had been honored at a soccer match between Real Madrid and Valencia at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium. This public recognition in Spain took place approximately two months after the Nobel Prize announcement in Stockholm. At this event Vargas Llosa, of Peruvian and Spanish nationality, called soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo “a novelistic figure” (“una figura novelesca,” as reported in the Spanish newspaper El País, December 4, 2010). Before Vargas Llosa’s own trip to Stockholm, the Latin American writers who made this monumental journey were Octavio Paz (in 1990), Gabriel García Márquez (1982), Pablo Neruda (1971), Miguel Ángel Astu-

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rias (1967), and Gabriela Mistral (1945). The most resounding, poetic, and highly cited of their acceptance speeches had been delivered by García Márquez and Neruda. In his speech, titled “The Solitude of Latin America,” García Márquez reviewed the historical traumas of the region of his origin, the thousands of deaths, and the plethora of European solutions to the dilemmas of Latin America. Speaking of Europe, García Márquez lamented that the interpretation of Latin American reality through patterns not their own only has served “to make us more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.” The Colombian Nobel laureate quoted Faulkner, who had affirmed in his Nobel speech (when Vargas Llosa was still a high school student in Lima) that he declined to accept the “end of man.” García Márquez ended his Nobel presentation with a grand flourish, affirming the power of the writer to imagine and invent a better reality. In Neruda’s lyrical speech in Stockholm, he compared the work of a poet to the work of a baker. He then claimed that the writers of the Americas listen increasingly to “the call to fill this mighty void with beings of flesh and blood.” Their grandiose, broad-sweeping statements about the past and present of the Americas were perhaps one reason why Vargas Llosa’s Nobel acceptance lecture was the opposite: a fundamentally nonlyrical, nonmetaphorical, and non-utopian, down-to-earth series of observations and statements about his life as a writer. This was classic Vargas-Llosathe-essayist, and the words of a writer whose enthusiasm and optimism, with age, had perhaps waned a little compared to García Márquez and Neruda. «

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“I am not a neoliberal, I am a liberal, someone who believes in democracy, liberty, and against all forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism” (“No soy neoliberal, soy liberal, alguien que cree en la democracia, en la libertad, en contra de toda forma de autoritarismo y totalitarismo”). Vargas Llosa made this affirmation at his press conference in Stockholm the day after his arrival, on Monday, December 6, 2010. This adamant rejection of “neoliberalism” was an important statement to articulate at this moment, the zenith of his career, after over two decades of being criticized regularly for supposedly being a neoliberal. He had appeared at the press conference in his standard Vargas-Llosathe-lecturer elegance and formality: black suit, pink shirt, solemn demeanor. The discussion on literature and politics in Latin America and

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the world, carried out in Spanish and English, in addition to his imposing physical presence, was so sobering and serious, in fact, that one Peruvian journalist simply requested a smile from the most recent Nobel laureate. Given the intensely increasing drug violence in Mexico in 2010, Vargas Llosa was asked about the international drug-trafficking issue. In matters such as this, Vargas Llosa’s more progressive side is apparent. He responded that drug consumption should be “decriminalized” and that the resources currently being used to fight the governments’ drug wars in nations such as Mexico and Colombia should be invested instead for the recovery and rehabilitation of the individuals affected by drug use. With respect to a journalist’s inquiry about the function and importance of literature, the Peruvian author responded with an explanation that was familiar to his readers. On the one hand, he spoke of how literature’s imaginary stories can enrich our lives and provide deeper insights into ideas and experiences of life. On the other hand, he repeated statements from as early as the 1960s, that literature can play a critical role in respect to the status quo of political and social reality. «

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Vargas Llosa delivered his Nobel speech on Tuesday afternoon, December 7, 2010, at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. During the day, he and the other Nobel laureates were given a tour of the Nobel Museum, where they saw artifacts from the lives of previous Nobel laureates, including typewriters, which might be expected, and some of the less expected, such as the bicycle one Nobel laureate had used during his research in Africa. Vargas Llosa’s Nobel speech accentuated, above all, his gratitude to the family members, friends, and writers who had made this literary recognition possible. In his lecture “Elogio de la lectura y la ficción” (“In Praise of Reading and Fiction”), he began by announcing that he had learned to read at the age of five in the Colegio de la Salle in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and that reading gave him access to the world of literature. As a child, his first writings were continuations of the first stories that he read. Some seven decades later, he realized that he had spent his life doing a very similar exercise: continuing, as he grew up and aged, the stories that had filled his youth with adventure, excitement, and entertainment. Among the literary masters who taught him how to write fiction,

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he first cited Flaubert, who had taught him that talent is a tenacious discipline requiring much patience. He explained that he learned from Faulkner about form—the writing and structure of form—which adds to themes or detracts from them. With the naming of these two masters early in his speech, Vargas Llosa was underlining the two key figures for not only the beginning of his literary career, but for his entire life: Flaubert and Faulkner were his real models. The other writers, several of whom he cited in his Nobel speech, are relatively minor in comparison. Beyond the carefully articulated gratitude for the contributions of his relatives and friends, as well as the writers to whom he owed debts, Vargas Llosa then rehearsed well-known explanations that he has set forth over the years concerning matters such as why it is important for humans to read and write literature. Without the good books we have read, Vargas Llosa argues, we would be more conformist and less critical, and for him, criticism is the generator of progress. With this statement, Vargas Llosa alluded to the progress that is the foundation of all of his critical thinking. “Progress,” “modernization,” and “modernity” are the keywords that reappear throughout his work. According to Vargas Llosa, as he explained in Stockholm, reading and writing are a protest against the insufficiencies of life. For this Peruvian writer, the human condition is such that life would be unbearable if literature did not offer possibilities that we can never live in our real lives. This portion of the Nobel speech is one that Vargas Llosa has developed in a variety of essays and interviews over the years. Other than the adamant statement about not being a neoliberal, the most politically noteworthy topic in Vargas Llosa’s Nobel speech was his statement about indigenous peoples, which was more carefully wrought, precise, and uncontroversial than most of his previously articulated positions on these people. He had been harshly criticized for his earlier opinion that the long-term solution for the indigenous peoples of the Americas is modernization. His statement in the Nobel speech was unambiguous: for over two centuries the emancipation of the indigenous peoples has been exclusively the responsibility of all Peruvians (“es una responsibilidad exclusivamente nuestra”) and one in which Peru has failed. Vargas Llosa defined the liberation of indigenous peoples as the task of all Latin America with no exceptions. This statement was a response to the current situation of indigenous peoples, which he called a “shame” (“verguenza”). The remainder of Vargas Llosa’s Nobel acceptance speech was familiar terrain for his readers, including such frequent topics as liberty or

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freedom (libertad), his Marxist period, his fascination with the French writers in vogue in the 1950s (Sartre, Camus), and, once again, the importance of literature for society. Vargas Llosa associates freedom with literary expression, pointing out that despots always control the citizens’ access to literature. Vargas Llosa has never denied the Marxist period of his past: this was not only an important stage in his intellectual formation, but also an example of an aspect of human behavior that the writer regularly exploits in his fiction—his own contradictions. In the concluding part of his Nobel speech, Vargas Llosa reaffirmed his point of departure, insisting that dreaming, reading, and writing are a response to the inevitable passage of time, a way to make the impossible possible. «

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In the freezing temperatures of Stockholm, with a blanket of snow covering the entire city, Vargas Llosa’s limousine pulled up to the local institute for Hispanic studies late in the morning on Wednesday, December 8, 2010. He looked physically drained as he moved through the crowd of Spanish photographers, journalists, and fans who were there on the sidewalk to get a glimpse at the new Nobel laureate. Vargas Llosa entered the institute, which, on the main floor, contained a comprehensive exhibit covering the writer’s life and career. Pictures from key periods of Vargas Llosa’s life were the anchors of this exhibit. Visitors could mingle among life-size pictures mounted on large rectangular blocks spread throughout the space of the exhibit, which also showcased early manuscripts written in the writer’s trademark notebooks. On Wednesday evening, a day after Vargas Llosa delivered his Nobel speech and two days before he actually received the prize, the Nobel laureates were honored with a concert. The special guest performer was the American violinist Joshua Bell. Mario and Patricia were seated in the balcony with the Swedish royalty and the other Nobel laureates. Bell’s performance was spectacular, and the audience responded with great enthusiasm. On Thursday morning of December 9, 2010, Vargas Llosa visited a public school in the suburbs of Stockholm. This multiethnic elementary school hosted a discussion with the author on multicultural topics. The Nobel Prize ceremonial dinner and conferral of the prize itself took place in Stockholm on Friday, December 10, 2010. Vargas Llosa was

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accompanied by his family, the Swedish royalty, and the other 2010 Nobel laureates. Mario was invited to give the official toast, which he did in the form of a story—a fairy tale in which a five-year-old boy learned to read and saw this change his life. Thanks to the adventure stories that he read, he discovered a way to escape from his poor home, from his poor country, and from the impoverished reality in which he lived, and to travel to marvelous places, encountering beautiful people and surprising things every day and every night. This young boy enjoyed reading these stories so much that he too started inventing stories and writing them. He was very aware that the world of dreams and literature was one thing, and quite another was the reality of the “real” world; he knew too that the former only existed while he was reading or writing. Until one New York morning the boy got a call from Stockholm about a prize. Since then, his life has been a fantasy in which he has not been sure if he is living a literary dream or “real reality.” «

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After the Nobel activities in Stockholm, Vargas Llosa flew the following week to Lima for the celebrations in Peru. President Alan García presented him with a special, newly coined award, and the author made two public appearances. The reception of the politically controversial intellectual figure was mildly positive, perhaps more positive than might be expected, given the number of severe critics that Vargas Llosa had had in Peru since his political interventions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Vargas Llosa’s first public appearance was at an academic conference in the historical center of Lima. It involved a brief statement by him, followed by the standard questions about the role of the writer and the public intellectual. The second public appearance was at the Museo de la Nación (National Museum) in the afternoon of December 15, 2010, where there was a large and elaborate exhibit on Vargas Llosa’s life and career. Quite similar to the exhibit in Stockholm, the Museo de la Nación setup featured the same enlarged pictures of Vargas Llosa’s entire life from his infancy, as well as material objects related to his reading and writing: notebooks with handwritten notes, articles from the press, and even clothing from cadets at the Leoncio Prado military school. Vargas Llosa’s public appearance at the Museo de la Nación involved a dialogue (“Conversatorio”) with the Peruvian writer Alfonso Cueto and the academics José Miguel Oviedo, David Gallagher, and Efraín

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Kristal. The focus of this conversation was the novel that had just appeared in print a month before, El sueño del celta. Each of the four gave a brief presentation on the novel, followed by remarks by the author, who was visibly impressed with their work on his novel. When asked to comment upon these presentations, Vargas Llosa offered an anecdote from his early experience as a writer that convinced him, supposedly, that his critics know his work better than he does. In the mid-1960s, in a private discussion with a French critic, Vargas Llosa mentioned the ambiguous death of the cadet in the recently published La ciudad y los perros. Much to Vargas Llosa’s surprise, the critic vehemently proclaimed that Jaguar had indeed killed him. Standing corrected by the self-assured critic, Vargas Llosa explained—evoking chuckles in the audience in Lima—that he had learned his lesson: his critics know his novels better than he does. «

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In early November of 2010, a month after the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Vargas Llosa flew to Madrid to introduce his new novel, El sueño del celta. The first edition in Spanish, published by the multinational Alfaguara, was an instant best seller in Spain and Latin America. In the press conference related to the publication of this novel, Vargas Llosa spoke briefly of the extensive research and travel involved in telling a story with historical roots in Africa, Latin America, and Ireland. «

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On October 7, 2010, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, had announced in Stockholm that the Nobel Prize for Literature was being awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa. The official statement of the Swedish Academy with the announcement was the following explanation, written as an incomplete sentence: “Cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” Vargas Llosa had received the phone call from Stockholm at 5:30 a.m. in New York, and by that afternoon had already taken a stroll in Central Park, done an interview for Swedish television, and held a press conference at the Cervantes Institute. He was teaching two classes as a visiting professor at Princeton University that fall semester of 2010; with the announcement of the Nobel Prize, his previously scheduled October lecture on campus had to be moved to a larger venue.

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A month after the announcement of the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, the North American novelist and English professor David Milofsky, writing for the Denver Post (November 7, 2010), commented on the recent selection of Mario Vargas Llosa. He asserted that “the Nobel Committee actually got it right,” even though the bookmaking chain Ladbrokes had given the Peruvian writer 25–1 odds of receiving the award. Milofsky observed that the last North American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature had been Toni Morrison. Milofsky quoted the permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy of two years previous, Horace Engdahl, who had told the Associated Press, “The United States is too isolated. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.” The opinion of the Swedish Academy is interesting in the context of Vargas Llosa as a twenty-first-century writer. As a participant in the “big dialogue of literature” this is a writer in constant dialogue with Flaubert and Faulkner, and who in the twenty-first century has researched and written books set in historical contexts of the Dominican Republic (La fiesta del Chivo), France, Peru, and Tahiti (El paraíso en la otra esquina), France and Peru (Travesuras de la niña mala), and the Belgian Congo, Ireland, and Peru (El sueño del celta). During the period these novels appeared in print, Vargas Llosa published a journalistic account of the war in Iraq (Diario de Irak) and took strong positions as a public intellectual on the political affairs and drug-trafficking struggles of several Latin American nations. For a committee interested in a writer involved in the “big dialogue of literature,” Vargas Llosa was a logical, and apparently ideal, selection. «

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That same November, the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico invited a group of Vargas Llosa scholars to their campus for a two-day symposium on the author. I accepted with the assumption that I would be seeing Mario there, since he was listed as a major speaker at the International Book Fair (Feria Internacional del Libro), taking place at the same time. Once I arrived at the conference, I was to present brief comments on Tirant lo Blanc, citing the medieval text in the original Catalonian that I had recently learned to read as part of my work on Var-

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gas Llosa. I was disappointed to learn at our preconference dinner that Vargas Llosa was to be present the next day at the book fair, but not actually at our conference at all. In mid-morning, our conference was interrupted by a special guest: Vargas Llosa had taken note of our program and decided on his own, independent of the book fair, to greet and thank his scholars. We were all most pleased to see him and to shake his hand as he exited back to the book fair. (When we met in Madrid in 2011, I thanked him for having publicly recognized me personally by name in Monterrey; contrary to the cliché, not all writers dislike their critics, and although I doubt if we actually impress him very often with our academic writings on his work, he has been exceptionally kind and courteous to us.) «

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In 2006 Vargas Llosa made his second trip to Stockholm, having been there in June 1978 as the president of the PEN Club International. Neither trip was particularly pleasant in professional terms. On the first trip, he was involved in polemics about having the Spanish language accepted as an official language of the PEN Club. At the end of the conference, he did have a conversation with Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy (well known at the time as the key member for writers in Spanish) about the Nobel Prize and writers of the Spanish language. At the 2006 conference, Vargas Llosa was accompanied by his Swedish and French translators, as well as scholars of several nationalities. Vargas Llosa found himself involved in a heated, hourlong debate with an exiled member of the Shining Path, who claimed that Vargas Llosa does not care about Peruvian politics. As the interchange escalated in emotion, Vargas Llosa screamed at the Peruvian exile “Read me!” (“¡Léanme, léanme!”). After the conference, a Swedish newspaper referred to Vargas Llosa as a “giant” of international fiction. «

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I strolled around Vargas Llosa’s neighborhood in central Madrid right on the Plaza de las Descalzas, near the Barrio de las Letras, for a few hours before our conversation that took place on July 4, 2011, seven months after the Nobel Prize activities. I got a sense for some of the author’s daily life—the places where he likes to read and write in the after-

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noon. I ate at the nearest restaurant to his residence, the Mesón Las Descalzas. His third-floor residence (a condominium that in Spain is called a piso) overlooks the Plaza de las Descalzas, and is close enough to the Pirámide de Egipcia that he and Patricia do their morning walk there. In the afternoon, he often goes to cafés to edit his writing and to read. Since the October 2010 announcement of the Nobel Prize, he has had to abandon some of his preferred afternoon cafés, such as the Café Central, which had been his favorite spot until right before the announcement of the prize. In his twenty-first-century life in Madrid, he has also continued one of his favorite routines since his student days in the 1950s—going to the Biblioteca Nacional to read. After I made it through the labyrinth of stairs and elevators to the third floor of his building, I was in exactly the same environment of all of Vargas Llosa’s previous homes: modern furniture accentuated with glass, with a large glass desk where he works. Contemporary avantgarde painting and sculpture were abundant, particularly the work of his friend the Colombian world-class artist Fernando Botero. This was the first time we had ever spoken in Madrid, so I began with the city as our first topic. Why Madrid, I wondered, rather than the city that had always fascinated him, Paris. In response, Vargas Llosa described himself as a citizen of the world who finds Madrid, above all, a good place to do his work—reading and writing. My probing invited him to say something negative about Paris, but to the contrary, Vargas Llosa insisted on his having a very good relationship with Paris, a place that he still enjoys visiting frequently. Madrid, however, in addition to being a good workplace for this bi-national and multilingual writer, is an exceptionally comfortable urban living space for Patricia and the remainder of his family, who love the daily life of Madrid a few blocks from the Plaza Mayor. We then moved to the Nobel Prize and any effect it might have had on Mario’s work. As flattering as receiving the prize has been, he explained, he believes that it has not made him a better writer or a worse writer. It has made him a more public figure, which sometimes, according to Vargas Llosa, has been uncomfortable or distracting. He has always exercised a defined work regimen, but since the Nobel Prize, for the first time in his life, he has occasionally not been able to maintain his disciplined writing schedule. His references to writing discipline per se remind me of our 1983 breakfast conversation in St. Louis, Missouri, in which he revealed that writing by hand was his “therapy” (terapia). I reminded him of that con-

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versation and asked if writing by hand was still his therapy. He responded affirmatively and this led us to a brief discussion of his notebooks: the elegant Italian notebooks that he always purchases on his trips to Italy, and in which he writes the first draft of all his creative work. When I asked him if he ever considered professional work with a psychologist or psychiatrist, he responded with one adamant sentence that closed this subject of inquiry: “Uno tiene que cultivar la neurosis” (“one must cultivate one’s neuroses”). With this exchange, I felt I had updated myself on the writer’s personal situation in the context of his traumas, and we moved to El sueño del celta. Vargas Llosa explained that the origin of his interest in Roger Casement, the protagonist of El sueño del celta, was the fact that he happened to be reading large portions of Conrad simply out of interest in Conrad. In the process of reading Conrad’s biography of Casement, however, Vargas Llosa became interested in Casement’s case per se. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was written because of what Conrad had learned about Casement, Vargas Llosa pointed out. The more he read, the more Vargas Llosa found Casement to be a fascinating man. In reading the Conrad biography and additional writings about Casement (including academic studies), Vargas Llosa became interested in a novelistic project, an interest that subsequently brought him to Africa, Ireland, and London for further research. The visit to Africa and the related research exposed Vargas Llosa to an ugly side of colonialism, the sacking of Africa for natural resources and the cruelest forms of human exploitation. A centerpiece for the controversy that has always surrounded Casement was the set of diaries he had written; the British government used these diaries to defame the diplomat’s character. Vargas Llosa went to London to undertake his own analysis of the diaries, and found these writings (in different versions) to be ambiguous and contradictory at best, and not in any way conclusive. He also found the language of the supposed personal diaries to be unreliable; they contain vulgar language, for example, that Vargas Llosa believes not to be the discourse of Casement, for the latter, as a diplomat, was a proper gentleman of his times. In a statement that repeats one of Vargas Llosa’s tenets about writing, he explained: “I believe he used the diaries for what he could not live.” The brutal exploitation of human beings and natural resources in Africa and Latin America, as well as the ambiguous diaries, make it understandable that Vargas Llosa was fascinated with this project. Indeed, the Peruvian author’s biography has much in common with Casement’s. This initial interest in Roger Casement had begun while Vargas

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Llosa was still finishing El paraíso en la otra esquina. El sueño del celta was a novel that Vargas Llosa researched, developed, and completed relatively quickly: many of his novels, such as El paraíso en la otra esquina, were decade-long projects, but El sueño del celta took approximately half that time. El paraíso en la otra esquina, on the other hand, was a novel that Vargas Llosa thought about and developed in a period longer than a decade. I remember Mario talking about his interest in a Flora Tristán project in the early 1990s. It began as a novel about the French Peruvian feminist, activist, and writer, but as Vargas Llosa began to see the parallels between Flora and the French painter Paul Gauguin, he developed Gauguin as the other major figure in the novel. In now-classic Vargas Llosa fashion, his research for El paraíso en la otra esquina involved both library work and travel. He spent approximately three weeks in the islands around Tahiti, exploring the utopian world Gauguin saw there, as well as following Flora Tristán’s route around France, staying in several of the towns where she had lived. Vargas Llosa and I concluded our conversation in Madrid that July on the subject of poetry; I had been surprised to find him publishing poems in the latter part of a career that had been dedicated entirely to prose. When I queried Mario about this, he began by referring to Borges’s early statement that poetry permits only excellence, i.e., less than excellent poetry is bad poetry. Aware of this, the young Vargas Llosa had always destroyed all his poems. In the late 1990s, however, he was working on a Homer project for which he was studying different translations, since he does not read Greek. After finishing these readings, he decided to write a poem in honor of Homer, the father. I believe this return to poetry late in life is quite likely Vargas Llosa’s ultimate Oedipal reaction to his own father, the man who had ridiculed him as an adolescent for reading and writing poetry. «

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For many years, I believed that Vargas Llosa’s main debt to Flaubert was technical, for it was in Flaubert’s novels that he discovered the most neutral and transparent of omniscient narrators, as well as his much-used “telescoped dialogues.” I have never given much credence to his claim in his book on Flaubert that he actually fell in love with the character Madame Bovary when he first read the novel in Paris at the age of twenty. Today, after several decades of reading Vargas Llosa and rereading his work, my understanding of this claim has changed: I be-

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lieve Vargas Llosa has always identified closely with the fictional character Madame Bovary as the traumatized victim whose life was limited by provinciality until she rebelled. That was the nature of his supposed passion for Madame Bovary. «

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At the university in Mexico’s northern city of Monterrey, the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, the organizers of a special chair, the Cátedra Alfonso Reyes, invited me along with Vargas Llosa in April 2000 for a two-day visit: one day to lecture about Vargas Llosa and another day to serve as moderator of a dialogue between the Peruvian writer and a large audience of students (all in Spanish, of course). On the first day, we began our public dialogue in Monterrey with my asking him to talk about his then-recent book Cartas a un joven novelista (Letters to a Young Writer). I asked him how this book came about and how it related to his previous critical ideas on the novel, these concepts such as “craters,” “demons,” and the like. Vargas Llosa explained that Cartas was the first book that he had written that was not one of his own ideas, but that of an editor. This editor had proposed publishing a set of letters to young writers, along the lines of Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous letters to a young poet. The young writer asked Rilke questions about his experience as a poet and this interchange resulted in what Vargas Llosa considers a beautiful book in which the poet explains in rational terms what poetic creation might be considered. Vargas Llosa immediately accepted the editor’s proposal, not so much because he thought the book would be instructive to young writers but, rather, in order to organize in his own mind the diverse set of ideas that he had set forth over the years on writing, the creative process, and the like. His Cartas a un joven novelista, Vargas Llosa emphasized in Monterrey, demonstrated above all the personal and subjective nature of his critical ideas. More than anything else, he wanted to describe in these letters how subjective and unconscious forces take over the novelizing process once the initial plan is complete. Vargas Llosa insisted on adding one more prefatory comment about this book: it represents his own personal critical vocabulary, as opposed to academic critical discourse. For Vargas Llosa, the scientific pretense of academic critical discourse in effect kills the vitality of his more subjective, personal way of doing critical reading and writing. He uses as his example of his critical vocabulary the term “crater,” which seemingly

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has no equivalent in academic literary theory. In this book, of course, I have written of these “craters”: the episodes in a novel with exceptional force, anecdotes that concentrate more experience than the other passages, making them the most memorable of the novel. It seems to Vargas Llosa that this happens with certain episodes of a novel that are “grabados” (“left taped”) in our imaginations and immediately come to mind when we remember a novel. In this dialogue in Monterrey, Vargas Llosa was particularly interested in emphasizing something that some everyday readers or nonacademic readers have had difficulty accepting: the narrator of a story is never the author. There is a natural tendency, Vargas Llosa observed, to identify the narrator who tells the story with the author. But Vargas Llosa reiterates that it is really never this way: the narrator is always a character, an invention. Then I asked the author about two other concepts that Vargas Llosa has discussed over the years: vasos comunicantes (“communicating vessels”) and “total novel.” Vargas Llosa was uncertain about whether anyone else had ever used the term “communicating vessels” in a literary context. He remembered beginning to use the term when he was working on an essay on Tirant lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell. He explained that “communicating vessels” is a technique that consists of narrating by creating unity among episodes that appear in different spaces and times, but which share a common denominator. It is a technique, he continued, that modern novelists, as well as classic writers of the past, use frequently. In Madame Bovary there is the famous scene in which the farmers bring their animals and products to the fair, and the narration about this fair is intercalated with a dialogue between Madame Bovary and a local aristocrat who is attempting to seduce her. This contrast—the use of communicating vessels—affects both of the episodes taking place. This is not merely the mechanical juxtaposition of two narratives, but a masterful enrichment of both story lines. Vargas Llosa admires Faulkner’s The Wild Palms very much, a novel in which two story lines are told in alternating chapters. As we have seen in parts II and III of this study, of course, Vargas Llosa consistently uses the communicating vessels exactly as Faulkner did in The Wild Palms. In our public discussion in Monterrey, we then moved to the subject of the “total novel” (novela total), a concept that Vargas Llosa and Fuentes popularized in the Hispanic world in the 1960s. In response to my question, Mario explained that his idea for the “total novel” was born, again, reading Tirant lo Blanc, what he called an “enormous” and

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“immense” novel, as novels of chivalry tend to be. According to Vargas Llosa, Martorell’s work is difficult to identify, difficult to categorize: an epic novel, a novel of customs, a military novel, a psychological novel. It is a novel about individuals, but also about collectivities, for many of its anecdotes are about mass movements. Consequently, this novel eventually creates a sense of dizziness, as Mario explained, because of the richness of the material elements it contains. Reading Tirant lo Blanc and reflecting on its extraordinary abundance, Vargas Llosa suddenly realized the importance of the quantity in itself. He thinks that this is the only genre that works this way, for poetry can be very concentrated and present an entire universe in very brief space. In a novel, Vargas Llosa explained, this kind of condensation or synthesis is not necessarily a virtue. When a novel expands in time and space, it can present individuals and social worlds, as well as the political, social customs, the erotic, and the like. «

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I met for an evening with Mario and Patricia in London in July 1994, more with intentions of maintaining contact than conducting a formal interview on a specific topic. But, as always, I gained further insight. I came by their home in London, on Montpelier Walk, and from there we went to dinner at an Indian restaurant, followed by a play. London has been very important for Vargas Llosa’s career. Fuentes once explained to me how he appreciated the relative anonymity of the Latin American writer in London, an experience different from Paris. Both Vargas Llosa and Fuentes appreciated, as well, the sense of civil behavior of the British in the public sphere; in many ways, London is more than a cosmopolitan city for the Latin American writer—it is also a comfortable one. We began our informal conversation with the usual interchanges that Mario, Patricia, and I often have about health. Beyond the typical light courtesies about how young and healthy we claim each other seem to be, we have talked in some detail about what we have been doing for our health. This exchange often begins when I ask him if he is still jogging, as he was in the 1980s and early 1990s. Patricia has always been far more concerned about health—and particularly diet—than has Mario, and she has taken the initiative to assure me that her husband eats healthy food, as well as occasionally going to France to re-energize in health resorts. It was not until 2010 and 2011 that for the first time, this writer, scholar, and public intellectual seemed to be paying a price

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for his busy schedule and travel: he had visibly aged and had the physical appearance of an elderly senior citizen. Among the four writers of the Boom, nevertheless, Vargas Llosa is the youngest and the only one to establish an identity as a writer of the twenty-first century: Cortázar died in 1984; García Márquez finished his creative work by the end of the twentieth century and has been ill in recent years; Fuentes published novels that are likely to be considered only his minor work in the twentyfirst century and died in 2012. Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, has published at least two major novels in the twenty-first century (La fiesta del Chivo and El sueño del celta), received the Nobel Prize in the twenty-first century, and continues writing in his mid-seventies. In my 1994 encounter with Vargas Llosa and Patricia, more than at any other time other than the 2010 interview in Madrid, I could clearly perceive in a new way his vast and deep interests in a broad range of the creative arts. In his public persona, he comes across so well as the dedicated and professional novelist, as well as the public intellectual, that the human being who lives very much in the world of arts in general is perhaps obscured. In London (and Madrid), more than in his brief visits to the United States, this artistic side of Vargas Llosa—the poet and art enthusiast—was evident. The preparation for this insight had come in my 1991 interview with Mario’s mother in Lima, for Dora de Vargas was a highly artistic person in her own right. «

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In May of 1991, I traveled to Cochabamba, the town where Vargas Llosa spent his childhood, with the intention of beginning my second book on Vargas Llosa, perhaps a biography, there in highland Bolivia.1 I strolled around the space where the child had lived, until he was eight years old, with the Llosa clan. The spacious Llosa home was still intact, probably little changed from the late 1930s and early 1940s. The nearby Plaza de Armas (central plaza) also appeared to be a postcard-picture scene of an idyllic small town, although it is surrounded today by urban sprawl. The nearby small private Catholic school where Mario learned to read was still there. I began to think of Vargas Llosa’s idyllic childhood. A few days later I was in Arequipa, where he was born, and saw another spacious, late nineteenth-century, two-story home. Arequipa reeks of the colonial order and paternal authority that marked Vargas Llosa’s life so traumatically. At the end of this trip, I was graciously received by Vargas Llosa’s

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staff in Barranco, and his primary person, Rosa, kindly gave me access to the writer’s personal library and papers. This was the first of several times I had the opportunity to peruse a library collection organized by preference: his most cherished books—the actual editions of Flaubert, Faulkner, and Hugo—are on the shelves closest to his desk. A biographer’s dream. (When I returned in 2011, the books on Roger Casement were directly above his desk.) I interviewed his mother, Dora de Llosa, on May 22, 1991, in her Lima apartment. She confirmed what I thought and what Mario confesses in his partial autobiography, El pez en el agua, surrounded by several doting women as a child in Cochabamba, he was a very spoiled child. With Rosa and her staff we went out for meals at Mario’s preferred hideouts (a pizzeria in Miraflores being his favorite) during his recent political campaign for the presidency, and I got a blow-by-blow account of how that campaign was lived on a daily basis. We also went to another of his favorite restaurants with him, a seafood restaurant. That trip to Bolivia and Peru did provide much of the groundwork for my second book on Vargas Llosa, Vargas Llosa: Historia de un deicidio, which I began writing (in Spanish) in a café in Cochabamba in 1991 and finished years later in Colombia. I left Lima in May 1991 with a sense that Vargas Llosa’s character and integrity had been seriously distorted by the press in Lima during the political campaign, and grateful that he lost the bid to become president. «

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When I was on the faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Vargas Llosa accepted our invitation, in April 1991, to lecture at two universities in Colorado and at the University of New Mexico. Since my first hosting of Vargas Llosa in St. Louis years before, I had always recognized this author’s fascination with what he calls “literary fetishism,” his interest in seeing the physical objects associated with the lives of deceased writers. After his presentation in Boulder on Borges, I drove the fift y-one-year-old Vargas Llosa first to Colorado Springs and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for his lecture at the University of New Mexico. I invited a graduate student, Fletcher Fairey, to join us on the trip in order to join in the conversation and take notes along the way.2 Our primary interest before arriving in Albuquerque, however, was to discuss with Vargas Llosa the D. H. Lawrence legacy as we drove from Boulder to the D. H. Lawrence ranch in Taos, New Mexico. Dur-

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ing this lengthy conversation, Vargas Llosa shared his ideas about Lawrence’s work and his ranch, and about art and pornography, and provided some background on what was then his most recent novel, Elogio de la madrastra. Fletcher and I initiated the conversation by asking Vargas Llosa why it was attractive for him to visit a place where D.H. Lawrence had spent a few years of his life, and where his ashes are now to be found. Mario began by confessing that he is indeed “a bit of a literary fetishist.” As mentioned, he is intrigued by the places and objects of writers’ experience. In Lawrence’s fiction personal experience was particularly important, and it was fascinating, according to Vargas Llosa, to see firsthand a part of his life. We inquired about the circumstances of his introduction to Lawrence’s fiction, and Mario explained that he had first read Lawrence as a university student in Lima in the early 1950s. He read the novels Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Vargas Llosa especially enjoyed Lawrence’s essays on American writers. As far as the language of these texts, reading Lawrence was similar to the method for reading Faulkner and other Anglo-American writers: Vargas Llosa had read them first in Spanish translation in the 1950s, and then he did a second reading in the original English in the 1960s. (As I reflect on this conversation many years later, in the twenty-first century, I realize that it was just as Vargas Llosa was writing his first novels in the 1960s that he was reading his masters in English [Faulkner and others, including Lawrence] and in French [Flaubert and others, including Balzac].) Why did Vargas Llosa return to Lawrence in the 1960s? It was the result of reading F. R. Leavis’s book on the English writer, a book which Mario found interesting although arbitrary, especially Leavis’s fascination with the moral goals of Lawrence’s work. So he read Leavis’s book along with corresponding Lawrence novels. He had also read a wonderful and influential essay on Lawrence by André Malraux. Why was Vargas Llosa’s generation so attracted to Lawrence? They read Lawrence, Mario explained to us during this trip to New Mexico, because he was a rebel. Among Latin American writers of his generation, there was a mystique about Lawrence because of the censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Vargas Llosa and his generation read Henry Miller for the same reason. Fletcher and I then noted the lack of cultural sensitivity in The Plumed Serpent, and, in response, Vargas Llosa deemed it to be Lawrence’s worst novel. He considered it a failure because it reveals Law-

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rence’s total incapacity to understand Mexico. The writing in The Plumed Serpent, according to the Peruvian writer, is kitsch, and he repeated his previous point: Lawrence didn’t understand anything about Mexico. Instead, he fabricated a story about this different world. Nevertheless, one can compare this novel, according to Mario, with other great novels, such as Women in Love and Sons and Lovers, and some of Lawrence’s short stories because it shows a fascination with esoteric worlds. If Vargas Llosa had read Faulkner with pen in hand, we observed, this would not seem to be the case with Lawrence. Mario agreed, affirming that Lawrence was not a model for his writing; he never read Lawrence with pen in hand, for Lawrence’s narrative technique was conventional and he was not very innovative, although his language was quite interesting. We speculated as to whether or not Vargas Llosa saw any points of contact between Faulkner and Lawrence, and the Peruvian writer did. Lawrence was not unlike Faulkner in his reaction against intellectualism. Both writers, according to Vargas Llosa, felt that intellectualism killed life and pleasure, that it took away from the richness of living. They both stressed the idea that theory and intellectualism suppressed spontaneity, which is the life-giving force. We then asked Vargas Llosa to talk about the role of sexuality in Lawrence’s work and fiction in general. Mario maintained that sexual experience is a central part of life and for an artist to ignore that is inappropriate. Especially the novel, as total representation, should not ignore the sexual, the sensual, and the erotic. It is only if these elements completely dominate a work that their use becomes mechanical and something resembling pornography. As far as the line between the sensual/ erotic work and pornography, Vargas Llosa considers it a fine one, and a matter of form. While the sexual in Lawrence is prudent and orthodox, as opposed to the baroque and torturous sex in Faulkner, it is often hyperbolic. This caused problems. But for Vargas Llosa it was not gratuitous sex: it was expressed very beautifully, with a stylistic excellence not found in pornography. As we talked about the sensual and the erotic in Lawrence’s fiction, this led us to the subject of the erotic in Elogio de la madrastra. We asked the author how he had conceived this work. Mario explained that the original idea was to create a book—a joint project—with Fernando de Szyszlo: Mario was going to write the text and Szyszlo was going to create the illustrations. They were never able to coordinate their ideas on the book. Nevertheless, the concept of relating paintings and fiction con-

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tinued to intrigue him. That is why the language in Elogio de la madrastra is so visual and descriptive. For the first time, Vargas Llosa did what he called langage précieux: the language in this novel is not transparent; rather, it is a presence by itself. «

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In the spring of 1986 (at the age of fift y), Vargas Llosa visited Washington University in St. Louis for a month. That institution, in which I was a recently tenured associate professor of Spanish at the time in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, had established the Lewin Distinguished Visiting Professorship, allowing them to invite once a year—to stay for a month—a visiting writer in residence. Under the auspices of this program, we had invited Carlos Fuentes in 1984, and he had delivered four sterling public lectures. These public appearances were the one requirement of the visiting professorship, and Fuentes’s stunning performances paved the way for future invitations for Latin American writers. At the time Vargas Llosa accepted our invitation, he was a world-class novelist and a healthy jogger who had not yet emerged as a candidate for the presidency of Peru. His political and economic positions had recently become more aligned with nineteenthcentury liberalism (or what his critics would call “conservative”), based on the writings of authors such as Hayek, whom he had recently read at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. When Vargas Llosa arrived on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis he had recently published Historia de Mayta. One setting awaiting Vargas Llosa there was a long-standing faculty seminar in the humanities, which had been established and directed by the writer and philosopher William H. Gass, an enthusiastic reader of Latin American fiction. This faculty-only seminar, with its weekly readings and discussions over wine and cheese, had covered such wide-ranging topics as Plato and Adorno. The topic for Gass’s faculty seminar for that spring semester was Latin American fiction, partially because Vargas Llosa was visiting and partially because I, as a regular participant, had proposed that topic. Vargas Llosa seemed truly interested in our faculty seminar when we invited him to join us in a session. (Years later, in fact, Vargas Llosa remembered the seminar, inquired if it had continued, and remarked more than once that he had enjoyed this activity very much; of the writ-

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ers of the Boom, Vargas Llosa is the most comfortable in a strictly academic setting.) A group of fifteen of us joined with Vargas Llosa for a dialogue on Wednesday, April 9, 1986.3 I began the discussion by asking Vargas Llosa to reflect a little on the 1960s Boom some two decades after this international phenomenon was at its zenith. I pointed out that obviously his writing of the 1980s was quite different from his writing of the 1960s, and asked him how he now viewed La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, and Conversación en La Catedral. The main difference he could see from the early novels was his attitude about form, he explained.4 Vargas Llosa was so enthralled with form that it was very visible in those works. As was the case for many Latin American writers of the 1960s, for him form was almost like a theme or a character in a novel. Since then, Vargas Llosa claimed, things had changed. Now, in the mid-1980s, he was interested in being less explicit about form in itself. He thought that many Latin American writers, including himself, now hid structure and technique in the story. In the case of Fuentes (whom Vargas Llosa mentioned specifically by name), this is evident when you compare his early writing to his recent fiction. Perhaps this was not the case for García Márquez, Vargas Llosa speculated, although it had been for Fuentes, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa himself. I then asked Vargas Llosa if he had imagined that he would ever again write a novel such as La casa verde, and his first response was that he did not think so. But he did not completely discard the idea, because he has remained interested in the technical possibilities of telling a story. He reiterated that now, unlike before, he simply attempts to be more invisible than when he wrote his first novels. (Interestingly, some two decades after this conversation, the author did return to some of the strategies and settings of La casa verde—most directly in El sueño del celta.) At this point in the conversation, Gass entered the dialogue, suggesting that what Vargas Llosa was talking about was what some North American writers call the difference between hard-bodied and softbodied books. In the insect world, the caterpillar has a soft body, while the beetle has all the bones on the outside, and the rest of it is inside. Gass thus speculated that what Vargas Llosa was evoking was a work in which the bones are hidden inside instead of outside. Furthermore, Gass had not noticed any such change with Cortázar. He seemed to be even more bony at the end. Vargas Llosa was not sure about Gass’s speculations and assertions,

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reminding him that the last books that Cortázar wrote—the short stories—were not as experimental as the previous works. The Peruvian novelist did agree with Gass in the sense that Cortázar was always trying to renew himself, including on a formal level. His last book, Vargas Llosa stated, was an experiment. Gass pursued further the matter of “renewal” by asking Vargas Llosa if he was suggesting that this process of renewal which used to be formal had shifted to another type of fiction. Vargas Llosa responded that when he wrote his first novels, he wanted very much to be modern. With this response, Vargas Llosa was reiterating what Octavio Paz had set forth in the late 1960s: the insane project of the Latin American writer, since the late 1960s, was a desire to be modern. Gass then moved the discussion to politics and writing, asking Vargas Llosa if he was prepared to recommend his political views in the area of the arts. Vargas Llosa responded that he was not prepared at all for this recommendation; there is a different kind of integrity when you write fiction or poetry than when you become a politician, a political thinker, or a journalist. Writing fiction, according to the Peruvian writer, depends entirely on one’s capacity to put a whole personality in what one is doing and to obey one’s most intimate drives. Michel Rybalka continued this line of thought, asking if these intimate drives perhaps relate to those private demons about which Vargas Llosa had written. Now (in the mid-1980s), Vargas Llosa explained, he would rather use the word “obsessions” or something like that, for that was his experience as a writer. He went on to explain how, after all of his rational planning of these books, these irrational obsessions eventually take over and become the most important factor in his fiction. What Vargas Llosa originally identified as “demons” (“demonios”) and later called his “obsessions” can be understood, in retrospect, as his traumas, many of which inevitably go back to his childhood experience with his father. It is also noteworthy that by this 1986 conversation in St. Louis, before his political campaign in Peru, he was already very critical of Latin American intellectuals. Later in the interview, when we talked about the role of intellectuals in the Canudos debacle in Brazil, I asked Vargas Llosa if he thought intellectuals were a problem now. “Yes, very much so,” he responded, “I think that a very important reason why it is so difficult in Latin America to defend the idea of democracy is because the intellectuals, and particularly the writers, have created so much prejudice and resistance against it.”5

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In an article offering glimpses of free-marketers in Vargas Llosa’s novels, Jean O’Bryan-Knight takes note of exactly when Vargas Llosa’s political transformation took place: in 1980, as we saw, while a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, the novelist read with interest the writings of Friedrich von Hayek, one of the intellectual pioneers of free-market liberalism and critic of socialism’s planned economies.6 O’Bryan-Knight also points out that Vargas Llosa often blends free-marketers and black-marketers. For example, he conflates the two in “La revolución silenciosa,” an introduction to Hernando de Soto’s book El otro sendero. In this essay, Vargas Llosa praises the informal or underground economy as a form of “popular capitalism.” Informal markets, Vargas Llosa argues in various essays of the 1980s and 1990s, should not be viewed as a form of delinquency that impedes economic development, but as evidence of workers’ creativity and resiliency that actually favors economic development. As Vargas Llosa stated in his 1986 interview in St. Louis, what he and his generation desired, above all, was to be modern. This insistence on modernity, which was often articulated by Fuentes, García Márquez, and a host of other writers from the 1950s forward, is a constant in Vargas Llosa’s thinking and writing during his entire career. In political terms, different variants of Marxism and socialism were viewed by Latin American writers in the 1950s and 1960s as ways of rejecting traditional modes of capitalism and, consequently, were more modern. In the 1980s, on the other hand, Vargas Llosa’s embracing of Hayek was part of this lifelong search, I believe, for the modern. One of the paradoxes of Vargas Llosa’s political persona is that his desire to be modern has been viewed in many circles as a “conservative” move when, in some ways, he continues to be “modern” and progressive in many spheres of his literary, intellectual, and political activity. It does indeed seem to be the case that Vargas Llosa’s reading of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom marked the beginning of changes in the Peruvian writer’s thinking. Apparently, many readers of Hayek’s book have been persuaded of the virtues of classical liberalism.7 Hayek’s book is an unusual combination of treatise in classical economics, defending the market against government intervention as the most efficient mechanism for setting prices, while marrying this thesis with an argument in political theory that this is also the best way to preserve individual liberty. Somewhat as Marx used economics to argue for a classless society,

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Hayek used economics to make a realistic case for liberty. In this respect, Vargas Llosa’s eventual shift from one to the other is not as strange as it might seem. It helps explain why “liberty” became the mantra in Vargas Llosa’s later campaign for the presidency, as well as in his political writings of the twenty-first century. Taking into account Vargas Llosa’s lifelong dedication to the proposition of being modern, as well as certain similarities in the thinking of Marx and Hayek, Vargas Llosa’s political changes since 1980 are understandable. In his public persona as the Latin American public intellectual, some of his statements and acts have suggested alliances with conservative forces. On the other hand, his portrayal of fictional characters—probably more an unconscious projection of his deep-seated Oedipal feelings than a conscious act—reveals a writer consistently in opposition to all forms of authoritarian rule. At the deepest levels of his writing, then, Vargas Llosa has written consistently against the traditional forces of political conservatism. «

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My conversation with Vargas Llosa in Oxford, Mississippi, and along the banks of the Mississippi River on I-35 was our most substantive interchange of the encounters over the years. It grew out of the writer’s month-long stay in St. Louis at Washington University. Our plan, during his visit to St. Louis, was to meet in Memphis, Tennessee, at the historic Peabody Hotel (which Vargas Llosa knew well from his readings of Faulkner). I spent several weeks preparing this interview. Mario and Patricia had gone to New Orleans in response to a lecture invitation, and on their return trip, my wife and I met them in Memphis. We began our homage to Faulkner with brunch at the Peabody Hotel; from there, we drove to Oxford. As we entered the town, Vargas Llosa was struck by how much Faulkner’s legacy was being ignored and purposely obscured in his hometown. Indeed, there were no visible references to the author. Using our written guide to Oxford, we found Rowan Oak, the Faulkner home converted into a museum, with only moderate difficulty. After signing the guestbook at the entrance, Mario was approached by two tourists from the Netherlands; they explained that they were in the Faulkner home precisely because they had read Vargas Llosa’s books with great interest and later came across a newspaper interview in which the Peruvian writer had spoken so highly of Faulkner.

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After touring the Faulkner museum, we proceeded to the nearby University of Mississippi to visit the Faulkner collection. A Faulkner specialist, Professor Frederick Karl of New York University in residence at the University of Mississippi, served as our tour guide through the collection and fielded Mario’s questions. For the third part of our trip to Oxford, we made a visit to the Faulkner tomb. Vargas Llosa insisted on buying some flowers, a vase of red geraniums, which he left solemnly at the gravesite. Having dedicated several hours to our homage to Faulkner, we began our drive back to St. Louis and our previously planned conversation on Faulkner. We drove as far as southern Missouri, to the town of St. Genevieve; quite fatigued by the end of the car trip, we slept overnight at a small bed-and-breakfast, Mississippi River–style hotel, before proceeding to St. Louis the next morning. I began our conversation that afternoon by asking Mario what he considered the best moment of the prior day. Vargas Llosa began by explaining that he was very moved at the cemetery, by the great austerity of the grave. He was intrigued by the lack of indication that a great man was buried in this modest setting. In addition, he found the Oxford area to be quite beautiful. Mario reflected on the fact that the attractive trees and homes probably had not changed much since Faulkner’s time, and that he had seen a lot of it as it was in Faulkner’s lifetime. He reiterated what we had established years before: he is very fetishistic in his relationship with the writers he admires. For him, it’s a moving experience to see a writer’s books, his manuscripts, and the objects of his daily life. Vargas Llosa was also very impressed by the fact that in Oxford—particularly the courthouse and the homes—one can see how close to reality the fiction was; this is rarely the case. For Mario, then, this trip to Oxford, Mississippi, was a wonderful experience. He found it difficult to explain, as we rode beside the Mississippi River along I-35, but for him another touching moment was when the Dutch couple said, “We are here because we have read you. We have read your novels. We decided to start reading Faulkner after reading your commentary on him in a newspaper.”8 I asked if what he had heard and seen in the past few hours had changed his sense of Faulkner, and he answered that he thought it might be too soon to say. Perhaps, he reflected, the new revelation was what Frederick Karl had explained to us about Faulkner’s drinking. Vargas Llosa knew that Faulkner was a heavy drinker, but he never realized that he drank so much. Now, Mario claimed, his admiration for Faulkner was even greater: if one drinks so much, how is it possible to create such a vast and complex world? How is it possible for a mind totally saturated

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with alcohol to handle such detail and create such coherence? On the other hand, the image Karl provided—of Faulkner drinking alone—was what Vargas Llosa considered tragic. Eventually, our conversation moved from Faulkner the man to his books. I asked Mario if he remembered his first reading of Faulkner and if it was as dramatic as the well-known story of his first reading of Madame Bovary. He remembered it well. It was in 1953, his first year at the University of San Marcos in Lima. The first book was Absalom, Absalom! That year, he read the short stories from These Thirteen too. Back then, he was reading Faulkner in Spanish and French translations. The French translations by Maurice Coindreau were, according to Vargas Llosa, marvelous. He was a great translator. Vargas Llosa had read his excellent translation of Sanctuary with its preface by André Malraux. He said that he believed that he discovered only then the importance of form for literature. Faulkner showed him that a given organization of time and point of view was absolutely essential, determining whether the text is subtle and ambiguous or rough and superficial. He discovered how form itself could be a character or theme in a novel. What Vargas Llosa remembered very well—and considered it important in understanding his relationship with Faulkner—was that the first writer whom he read with a pen in hand and paper at the side of the book was William Faulkner. When questioned about further details related to having a pen in hand when reading Faulkner, he clarified that he was looking for a rationale, a structure. At the time (early to mid-1950s), he was already writing a bit, and reading Faulkner opened his eyes to formal invention. Vargas Llosa was very excited about this idea. Faulkner also gave him the firm conviction that form should always be attached to a story; the story cannot be a goal, an end in itself. According to the Peruvian writer, fiction should always include the human experience. As one can see, Vargas Llosa claimed, he has always been very loyal to Faulkner’s idea of the novel. Despite this lifetime loyalty, Vargas Llosa never read Faulkner as obsessively as had been the case with Madame Bovary, primarily, perhaps, because at the beginning he could not read Faulkner in English. When Mario started reading Faulkner in English it was in the early 1960s, and with the French translation at his side. But Faulkner is one writer whom he has never stopped reading. He has read Light in August at least a halfdozen times. According to Vargas Llosa, that superb passage with Hightower preaching and mixing the Bible in his sermon and the castration of Joe Christmas is extraordinarily well done. As has been well estab-

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lished in this book, Vargas Llosa confirmed in this conversation that the writers he has read and reread the most are Faulkner and Flaubert. I then evoked a Faulkner issue oft-discussed among Latin American writers: the similarities between Latin American society and Faulkner’s South. Vargas Llosa agreed, pointing out that the societies are very similar because in each there are two basic cultures: that of the oppressor and that of the oppressed. He pointed out that the coexistence of these two societies is difficult. Also, the presence of the past is something very important in Latin America, as well as in Faulkner’s South. It’s a phenomenon, Vargas Llosa observed, which one does not have in the eastern portion of the United States. Faulkner’s is a traditional society, exactly like Peruvian and Colombian society. The class structure in Faulkner is totally Latin American. And Faulkner invented a technical tool to give this world life. This invention was very important for those Latin American writers, according to Vargas Llosa, who were searching for an instrument to do the same. One needs a kind of naïveté to dare to attempt to become a twentieth-century Balzac. This was very important for many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa affirmed. When we moved this discussion to which of Faulkner’s novels was the most important, Vargas Llosa said that Light in August is probably the book that he prefers. But he thought that the whole of Faulkner’s work is better than any book taken separately. For example, a weak novel, such as Mosquitoes, becomes more interesting when seen in the context of his total work. In Mosquitoes the young Faulkner was trying to be an intellectual rather than a creator, to write with his ideas rather than by instinct. He failed, and Mario thinks that this failure was instructive for him: he learned that he had to return to his own land. Perhaps Oxford was a kind of prison for Faulkner—Vargas Llosa speculated—but staying in Oxford was the price he paid for writing masterpieces. This whole thing was very interesting for Vargas Llosa. Because he felt similarly?, I asked Vargas Llosa. In some ways, he responded, he did feel similarly. Sometimes, he hated Peru, but he knew that even though he hated it, he needed that country. He felt that when he was in Europe in the 1960s. He knew that if he did not return to Peru, he would be finished. Unlike some other writers—such as Cortázar—Vargas Llosa is stimulated by his home country, even with all its problems. As the long conversation extended into the afternoon along I-35, I realized we had not talked at all about the important novel The Sound and the Fury. Vargas Llosa responded that it was a novel that he loved very much, even though he did not consider it a masterpiece. Here, according

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to Vargas Llosa, the equilibrium between form and content is broken. From time to time form predominates over what is told. In The Sound and the Fury, unlike Light in August, Faulkner approaches the mistakes of Joyce, who was defeated by indulgence in form. When I asked him if he considered As I Lay Dying more successful, he agreed wholeheartedly. For Vargas Llosa, As I Lay Dying was definitely more successful than The Sound and the Fury: here, form is consistent with the story. «

»

I take note of Vargas Llosa’s claim in our 1986 conversation that he had never read Faulkner as obsessively as Madame Bovary. The reason for this, according to the writer, is that at the beginning (in the early 1950s) he could not read Faulkner in English. I find it acceptable that the matter of reading in translation was a factor. Nevertheless, the protagonist in Madame Bovary relates deeply to Vargas Llosa’s childhood traumas, the traumatic experiences of the authority of the patriarchal order. For Vargas Llosa, Madame Bovary was a book much closer to his own experience that became his lifetime “demons” and “obsessions”— his traumas. Flaubert and Faulkner have in common one of Vargas Llosa’s lifetime interests in literature: probing forbidden subjects. During the period when Vargas Llosa was most intensely engaged in rereading Flaubert and Faulkner, in the 1960s, prominent French intellectuals whom Vargas Llosa admired, such as Sartre, were writing about these two writers. «

»

The twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa still carries much of his political and economic readings of the early 1980s. In his bi-weekly columns in the Spanish newspaper El País (which is widely distributed throughout the Hispanic world), in the first decade of the twenty-first century, he frequently criticizes numerous forms of government intervention. Thus the libertarian twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa writes against state pensions, labor unions, and the European welfare state, and writes in favor of “labor flexibility” (absence of job security). In his October 18, 2004, article “Toque de Piedra” in El País, he portrays South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore as models of modernization and the ability to integrate themselves into the world economy. Again, the consistency of Var-

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gas Llosa’s thought—consistency that dates back to his first essays in the late 1950s—is his embracing of modernity. «

»

In 1983 I extended the first invitation in my academic career to Mario Vargas Llosa to give a lecture on the campus where I was employed. This first invitation, which I sent to him in a handwritten letter, was an offer for him to practice some of his famous “literary fetishism”: I invited him to lecture on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis and then also to visit Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. He delivered a campus-wide lecture in English—far more fluent than the first lectures I had seen him deliver on the campus of Washington State University in 1968. He also engaged in a dialogue in Spanish that same day in the Spanish section of our Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. The next day, he spoke in French in a round-table discussion with my colleagues in French, and the following day the English professor Wayne Fields and I took him to Hannibal. The two days on campus were a huge success, leaving students and faculty both impressed and energized. When we went to Twain’s home in Hannibal, Vargas Llosa was fascinated in seeing the objects that had been part of the daily life of Mark Twain. During the return trip to St. Louis, he asked Professor Fields, a specialist in American literature, what I would call a classic question of Vargas-Llosa-the-novelist: “What do we know about Twain’s private life? Did he have any lovers?” «

»

Unlike Fuentes, who constructs novels around ideas or concepts, and García Márquez, who fabricates novels from a single image, Vargas Llosa organizes novels around a structure.9 In many ways, consequently, reading Fuentes is an intellectual experience related to history, reading García Márquez is a visual experience related to the pleasure of seeing a plot unfold, and reading Vargas Llosa is the experience of discovering a pattern unfold. Vargas Llosa’s most elaborate novels—La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral, La guerra del fin del mundo, and El sueño del celta—are elaborate expansions of complex structural schemes, always with a host of continually transforming characters. Once his organizational plan for his novels is conceived, the early novels follow a variation

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of the original pattern; in the later novels, Vargas Llosa tends to resist the early pattern. In a process that seems to be irrational for both the writer and the reader, enough of Vargas Llosa’s “demons” (i.e., traumas) enter to create novels that are compelling and, ultimately, transgressive. «

»

José Miguel Oviedo—an academic specializing in Vargas Llosa’s work and Latin American literature—organized a conference at the University of Indiana in 1980, inviting three celebrity writers of the Hispanic world as the plenary speakers: Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, and Mario Vargas Llosa. By 1980, as a recent PhD in Latin American literature, I had published my first two articles on Vargas Llosa, apparently the credentials that resulted in Oviedo inviting me to participate in the conference with a paper presentation. I vaguely remember presenting a brief paper on Vargas Llosa’s recent novel La tía Julia y el escribidor. More importantly, this conference was my first opportunity to meet Vargas Llosa personally. The forty-eight-year-old Vargas Llosa was an impressive, eyecatching physical presence when he entered the stage for his plenary lecture. After the lecture, I introduced myself as the person with whom he had agreed by letter to an interview. He was friendly and suggested I come to his room at mid-morning the next day. In the interview, I asked him questions about morality and his fiction; this was the topic which I then believed to be central to my first book on Vargas Llosa. Seven years later, when my first book on him (Mario Vargas Llosa, 1987) did appear in print, it was not actually on this subject. Nevertheless, the interview went well: he was a courteous and attentive listener and responded thoughtfully to my questions. «

»

The twenty-first century is one of the most interesting and compelling periods of Vargas Llosa’s six-decade career as a writer. The five novels of this period—El sueño del celta, Travesuras de la niña mala, El paraíso en la otra esquina, La fiesta del Chivo, and Lituma en los Andes— are comparable in quantity and quality to the work of Vargas Llosa that is generally considered his major work of the 1960s Boom: La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, and Conversación en La Catedral. Vargas Llosa’s twenty-first-century work also offers interesting com-

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parisons with the novels of the new generation of Latin American writers who began publishing in the early 1990s. Among the most prominent of these was the Chilean Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003), who enjoyed the most international recognition in the twenty-first century after the publication of his monumental novel 2666 (2004, 2666 appeared in English translation in 2008); Vargas Llosa would consider it a “total novel.” Among the most accomplished of this generation to publish novels in the twenty-first century, I would include the Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza, the Argentine Rodrigo Fresán, and the Mexican David Toscana. Works such as Fresán’s Mantra (2000), along with 2666, La fiesta del Chivo, and El sueño del celta, are comparable to the best moments of the total novels of the 1960s Boom. The heir to Vargas Llosa’s novelistic tradition? Toscana. «

»

The first time I saw Mario Vargas Llosa (although I did not meet him) was on the campus of Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, in the fall of 1968. I saw him deliver three public lectures that fall in the auditorium of the music building on the top of that campus’s hill. Vargas Llosa’s translator into German of his early novels, Professor Wolfgang A. Luchting, had invited the young thirty-two-year-old Peruvian writer to the Washington State campus as artist-in-residence, where he offered a graduate seminar, gave three public lectures, and worked on the manuscript for Conversación en La Catedral in the basement of a home that he and Patricia rented from an English professor on a sabbatical leave of absence. This small and isolated college town, located in wheat fields near the Idaho border, was the opposite of the cosmopolitan settings in Vargas Llosa’s life since he left Piura as an adolescent. Pullman did not even have a movie theater; Mario and Patricia had to drive to the nearby town of Colfax on Sunday afternoons to see movies—commercial Hollywood movies. From Paris to Pullman, undoubtedly, was quite a cultural leap. Nevertheless, it was a productive semester for the writer, a place where he advanced the writing of his novel Conversación en La Catedral into its final stages and taught some of his ideas on García Márquez in a graduate course—making it clear to the students that for him the true masters were Flaubert and Faulkner—ideas that soon thereafter appeared in the book-length study of the Colombian writer under the title García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (untranslated, García Márquez: history

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of a deicide). Other than his time working on these projects in the basement of his rented home, life in Pullman was not particularly attractive. During an unsuccessful attempt to cook some eggs in this rented home, unfamiliar with cooking on the gas stove, Mario managed to spill burning grease on the kitchen floor, destroying it. The first time I saw Vargas Llosa in person was while waiting outside the lobby of the music building auditorium at Washington State University. Escorted by the faculty in Spanish—professors Robert Knox, Billy Weaver, Angelo Cantera, and Luchting—an elegantly dressed future Nobel laureate entered the lobby followed by his small academic entourage, all speaking in Spanish. Again, I did not actually meet Vargas Llosa that fall; I observed his lectures from a distance. They were not refined performances, primarily because in 1968, before living in London, his English was heavily accented. His lectures, however, were informative, engaging, and even entertaining. I still remember one of them as the essay he published soon thereafter in Spanish about how he wrote the novel La casa verde. In the fall semester of 1968, many of us on that campus in Pullman became avid readers of Vargas Llosa. «

»

The most permanent image of Vargas Llosa for me is one of a man with a pen in hand. His daily writing by hand is his therapy, as he mentioned briefly at breakfast in St. Louis in 1983. Writing by hand is his way of “living his neuroses,” as he affirmed in our interview in Madrid, and is the proper way to deal with the Oedipus complex and related traumas. Reading Faulkner with pen in hand was the beginning of a writing career as a major modernist of the West. Reading Flaubert while taking notes was the key to the creation of a very particular kind of modernism that has become trademark Vargas Llosa.

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Appendix 1

An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa Madrid, Calle de la Flora, July 4, 2011 Translated by Raymond L. Williams

RLW: Has the Nobel Prize affected your work? MVLl: The Nobel Prize is very flattering but it has not made me a better writer or a worse writer. It has made me a more public figure. Sometimes this is uncomfortable or distracting. I have always had a certain discipline for my work and since the prize, occasionally, for the first time in my life, I have not been able to maintain my writing discipline. RLW: This is the first time we have met in Madrid. Do you live here in Madrid to keep your contact with the Spanish language? MVLl: No, not really. I have written well in Spanish living in France and England, and sometimes those other languages provide an interesting and useful contrast with the language of my writing in Spanish. Living in another language in your daily life, you live more in your own language; I discover subtleties of my own language. Madrid is a place where my wife, Patricia, and I like to live; it is very comfortable for us. We used to come here and stay in hotels, but ten or twelve years ago we moved to Madrid. For me, Madrid is above all a place to work. I start writing early in the morning, which is my most creative period of the day. RLW: Tell me more about this creative period. What time do you usually start working? MVLl: It depends. For example, this morning I was working at 5:30 a.m. After that early morning work, Patricia and I go for a walk on a set route nearby around downtown Madrid here, usually for an hour. We think it is a nice walk, a “bonito paseo.” This walk is really important, for this is when I plan my day’s work. We stroll through a couple of nearby parks. When we get back home, I take a shower and always read the newspapers. Around 10:00 or 10:30 a.m., I go back to the writing until 2:00 p.m. This is my work for the day here at home. After that, I like to go out to the cafés of Madrid and do the less creative work: editing, reading, rereading, and the like. I used to go a lot to the

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Café Central, but since the Nobel Prize, I have had to start hiding out in less conspicuous places. I continue going a lot to the Biblioteca Nacional, which, as you know, has always been one of my favorite places to work. I work until around 6:00 p.m., and then I don’t work in the evening. We go out to the theaters, see fi lm, and the like. RLW: Let’s talk about your recent work. Your novels of the twenty-first century— La fiesta del Chivo, El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, El sueño del celta—all take place in an international setting rather than exclusively Peru. Is that a self-conscious plan? MVLl: Not really, but I think I consider myself a citizen of the world, so the settings can be anywhere without a self-conscious plan to do that. RLW: What was your starting point for El sueño del celta? MVLl: Actually, I was reading Joseph Conrad’s biography of Roger Casement at the time I was still writing that novel that took me a long time, The Way to Paradise, not for my work on that novel, but out of my personal interest in Conrad. In reading Conrad, I discovered the world of Africa. Casement opened Conrad’s eyes to what was happening in Africa. I became intrigued with the figure of Casement, who was a fascinating man. I began reading more about Casement and, as happens with my novels, this reading and further research led me into the novel El sueño del celta. It is the world of Christian civilization, of progress, of barbarism. And Roger Casement confronts the truth: all of this was really about greed, lies, avarice, and, above all, the exploitation of the natives. In reality, what this Colonialism was about was a saqueo—a stealing of resources. Casement was a pioneer, a man of great merit, of great courage. When he began his campaign in Africa, he was a true pioneer. And in this sense he was like the person on whom I had based the previous novel, Flora Tristán. Knowing Casement allowed Conrad to write Heart of Darkness. Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness because of Casement, to a large degree thanks to Casement. Back then, when I was beginning to read about Casement, I was just looking at him out of curiosity, and then I realized that I had a novel. As I was working on some theater projects and was finishing The Way to Paradise, I began writing El sueño del celta. And even though it was a highly researched novel, it was still basically a work of imagination. RLW: In your research for this project, did you actually read Casement’s diaries? MVLl: Yes, of course, in London. I even read all the different versions of the diaries. In the early days, the different photocopies of these diaries were very contradictory, with the text of the diaries very changed from the original. In the early years of the existence of these diaries, the British authorities did not allow you to make photocopies of them. Since then, the British government has allowed researchers to work on the editions of these diaries. Now, in the last twenty years, the editions are more reliable. RLW: Were you interested in the fact that Roger Casement himself was so contradictory?

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MVLl: Absolutely. That interested me a lot. Besides, it interested me that he also went to the Peruvian Amazon, that he had documented Julio César Arana, a novelistic character in himself. RLW: From what I’ve read, apparently you believe his sex life as described in the diaries is fantasy. Is that how you see it? MVLl: Yes. I don’t think there was time for the British secret service to falsify his diaries. I think they were his. They would have needed years to do the falsification. But I don’t believe that he actually lived what he says what he lived, what he describes in the diaries. Casement lived in a Victorian world in which he would have gone to jail for that about which he wrote. But he was an educated man, a very proper diplomat, a man who respected institutions and the law. Consequently, I believe that he used the diaries to live what he could not have lived, what he would have liked to have lived. Above all, the diaries were written in a very vulgar language and this is one of the things that is most shocking. They give the impression that he lived a life that he could not have lived. They were beyond the realm of reality [fuera de la realidad]. All the reports, on the other hand, describe him as a very proper person who used very refined language. Nevertheless, he describes quite exaggerated sexual activity that he never could have carried out. RLW: In El sueño del celta, for the first time, you have descriptions of gay sex. MVLl: Aren’t there gays in my other novels? RLW: Well, you have the gay father of Santiago Zavala in Conversation in The Cathedral, for example, but without descriptions. Was this some kind of a challenge for you, as a writer, now in the twenty-first century, to attempt to describe gay sex in detail? MVLl: In El sueño del celta I had no choice really. I had to get there. It was central to the novel. I could not downplay or hide it. RLW: As you know, critics tend to say your major works are the novels of the 1960s. In this book, I am arguing the contrary—that your novels of the twenty-first century are major ones, and perhaps even the major ones. MVLl: What these critics say is unfair. These are lengthy, audacious novels [audaces] in the sense that they go beyond what I had done before, exploring fictional worlds in France, England, Ireland, and the Congo. RLW: Would you say that with these novels and the work such as your book on Iraq that you are in the “European dialogue”? You seem to have broadened your field of vision. I know the Swedish academy considers U.S. writers to be isolated from the “big dialogue.” MVLl: We now live in a period in which terms such as “an American,” “a Latin American,” or “a European” can no longer be considered isolated entities. So true, I have broadened my field of vision. Today, I believe, it is almost impossible not to be a citizen of the world. RLW: You were saying earlier that The Way to Paradise took you a long time. I remember that you were talking about it back in the 1990s.

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« 206 » Mario Vargas Llosa MVLl: Yes, The Way to Paradise took a long time. Although I had a certain basic familiarity with Flora Tristán and I had read her Peregrinaciones de una paria and some other things on her. Originally, the novel was just the story of Flora Tristán, but then I started seeing the similarities between the character of Flora Tristán and the personality of Paul Gauguin. I have always been interested in painting, in Gauguin, so I decided to include him in The Way to Paradise. I liked entering into the life of Gauguin. RLW: Your research into this novel even included a trip to Tahiti, right? MVLl: Yes, for two or three weeks. And even to the Islas Marquesas. It was a very interesting experience. I liked getting inside the secret world of Paul Gauguin. That world—the primitive world of Gauguin in Tahiti—explains a lot about the evolution of his painting. RLW: Let’s finish the conversation with your newest, most recent literary exploration, poetry. You’ve talked about reading poetry during your presidential campaign in 1990 . . . MVLl: Yes, indeed. I read Spanish Golden Age poetry daily as a literary exercise when I was living in the daily world of political discourse. Later, I would reread Homer in various translations, since I do not read classical Greek. It was a very moving experience. Afterwards, I wrote a poem to Homer. It is not a genre I have ever pursued for most of my life—since I was an adolescent—for I have always had a sense that the only good poetry is the very best poetry.

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Appendix 2

Fiction of Mario Vargas Llosa

In Original Spanish Arranged chronologically by date of publication Los jefes. Barcelona: Rocas, 1959. La ciudad y los perros. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1963. La casa verde. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1966. Los cachorros. Barcelona: Lumen, 1967. Conversación en La Catedral. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969. Pantaleón y las visitadoras. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1973. La tía Julia y el escribidor. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977. La guerra del fin del mundo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981. Historia de Mayta. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984. ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987. El hablador. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987. Elogio de la madrastra. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1988. Lituma en los Andes. Barcelona: Planeta, 1993. Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997. La fiesta del Chivo. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000. El paraíso en la otra esquina. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2003. Travesuras de la niña mala. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2006. El sueño del celta. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2010.

In English Tr anslation Arranged chronologically The Time of the Hero [La ciudad y los perros]. Trans. Lysander Kemp. New York: Grove Press, 1966. The Green House [La casa verde]. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Avon, 1973.

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Conversation in The Cathedral [Conversación en La Catedral]. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Captain Pantoja and the Special Service [Pantaleón y las visitadoras]. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos and Ronald Christ. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. The Cubs and Other Stories [Los cachorros]. Trans. Gregory Kolovaks and Ronald Christ. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter [La tía Julia y el escribidor]. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Avon, 1983. The War of the End of the World [La guerra del fin del mundo]. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Avon, 1985. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta [Historia de Mayta]. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986. Who Killed Palomino Molero? [¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?]. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987. The Storyteller [El hablador]. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989. In Praise of the Stepmother [Elogio de la madrastra]. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990. Death in the Andes [Lituma en los Andes]. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto [Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto]. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. The Feast of the Goat [La fiesta del Chivo]. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. The Way to Paradise [El paraíso en la otra esquina]. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003. The Bad Girl [Travesuras de la niña mala). Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. The Dream of the Celt [El sueño del celta]. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012.

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Appendix 3

Selected Essays of Mario Vargas Llosa

Collections in Original Spanish Listed chronologically, by date of publication García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971. Historia secreta de una novela. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1971. El combate imaginario: Las cartas de batalla de Joanot Martorell. With Martín de Riquer. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1973. La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1975. La verdad de las mentiras: Ensayos sobre literatura. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990. El pez en el agua. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1993. La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996. Cartas a un joven novelista. Barcelona: Planeta, 1997. Diario de Irak. Madrid: Aguilar, 2003. La tentación de lo imposible: Víctor Hugo y Los Miserables. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2004. El viaje a la ficción: El mundo de Juan Carlos Onetti. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2008.

Collections in English Tr anslation Listed chronologically, by date of publication The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary [La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary]. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986. A Writer’s Reality. Ed. Myron I. Lichtblau. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993. A Fish in the Water: A Memoir [El pez en el agua]. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994. Letters to a Young Novelist [Cartas a un joven novelista]. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002.

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Mario Vargas Llosa

The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables [La tentación de lo imposible: Víctor Hugo y Los Miserables]. Trans. John King. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. In Praise of Reading and Fiction: The Nobel Lecture. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011.

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Notes

Part I . Mario Vargas Llosa, El comercio, May 20, 1991, B4. The translation into English in the text is mine. . Ibid. . Personal interview with Dora de Vargas, Lima, May 22, 1991. . Vargas Llosa, A Fish in Water, 10. . Vargas Llosa, “On Being Nine and First Seeing the Sea,” 58. . Ibid. . Ibid. . Vargas Llosa, Historia secreta de una novela, 19. . M. J. Fenwick, Dependency Theory and Literary Analysis: Reflections on Vargas Llosa’s The Green House, 42. . Ibid., 65. . Vargas Llosa, Historia secreta de una novela, 15–16. . Vargas Llosa, El pez en el agua, 56. . This experience, his experience at the newspaper La Crónica, and his experience as a presidential candidate were the three times in his life that he had the special opportunity to view intensely all levels of Peruvian society. . José Miguel Oviedo, Mario Vargas Llosa: La invención de una realidad, 23. . Vargas Llosa makes a strong statement about both his childhood trauma and his lifelong campaign against all forms of authoritarian power (which tends to refer to his authoritarian father) in an article published in Salmagundi in 2007: “I reject with my whole being the barbarism represented by military caudillos and strongman dictatorships—all of them, without exception of the right or the left—; and stupid machismo; and nationalism, the great smokescreen behind which governments justify their own arms race mania and the abundant thievery it sanctions” (“Latin America from the Inside Out,” Salmagundi 153–154 [Winter–Spring 2007]: 32–41).

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« 212 » Notes to Pages 11–35 . Vargas Llosa, A Writer’s Reality, 43. . Fenwick, Dependency Theory and Literary Analysis, 55–76. . Vargas Llosa, El pez en el agua, 104. . Since writing that first play during his senior year in high school, Vargas Llosa has created eight plays in all: La señorita de Tacna (1981); Kathie y el hipopótamo (1983); La Chunga (1986); El loco de los balcones (1993); Ojos bonitos, cuadros feos (1996); Odiseo y Penélope (2007); Al pie del Támesis (2008); Las mil noches y una noche (2009). In the productions of these plays, which have been performed in several nations, Vargas Llosa has taken a variety of roles, including that of actor. The thematic content of these plays elaborates on topics discussed in his fiction, such as the fundamental importance of storytelling for human beings. . Fenwick, Dependency Theory and Literary Analysis, 55–76. . Vargas Llosa, La verdad de las mentiras, 135. . See David Aberbach on trauma and writing: Aberbach, Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis. . Vargas Llosa, “Prólogo,” Los jefes, 9. . Ibid., 4–6. . Vargas Llosa described this experience in an interview with Elena Poniatowska: “Al fin, un escritor que le apasiona escribir, no lo que se diga de sus libros,” 2–3. . Todd Millicent, Peru: A Land of Contrast, 247. . Ibid., 289. . Vargas Llosa, Historia secreta de una novela, 48. . Ibid., 49. . Deslumbrado is the exact word Vargas Llosa has used in Spanish to describe how he felt; I am translating this as “stunned” in English. . I quote this statement by Carlos Fuentes as it appears in Oviedo, Mario Vargas Llosa: La invención de una realidad, 36. . Gene Bell-Villada has studied the specific passage in part II, ch. 8 of Madame Bovary; see “The Inventions and Reinventions of Mario Vargas Llosa,” Salmagundi 153–154 (Winter–Spring 2007). . Vargas Llosa, The Green House, 249. . Ibid., 347. . Ibid., 347. . The 1960s “Boom” resulted from the international recognition of the writing of Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and José Donoso; I will offer further details later in part I. See my further elaboration in The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel and The Writings of Carlos Fuentes, as well as José Donoso’s Historia personal del “Boom”. . Vargas Llosa’s conflict with García Márquez in 1974 led to his decision not to allow the publication of any new editions or translations of this book. Decades later, the only extant edition of García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio is the first one.

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Notes to Pages –

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. I studied at Washington State from 1968 to 1972; years later, well after Vargas Llosa’s departure from the campus, I listened to faculty comments on Vargas Llosa’s presence in the department in 1968, particularly his passion for Flaubert; see epilogue for more details. . Jean Franco, “Conversations and Confessions: Self and Character in The Fall and Conversation in The Cathedral,” 67. . See Mary Davis, “Mario Vargas Llosa: The Necessary Scapegoat.” . Raymond L. Williams, Vargas Llosa: Otra historia de un deicidio, 53. . Under the criteria I am using, Vargas Llosa has produced five “entertainments” and six “total” novels. . Vargas Llosa, Conversación en La Catedral, 73. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically. . With respect to the Postboom, Donald Shaw’s Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana: Boom, Postboom, Postmodernismo, chs. 8 and 19. Shaw observes the reaction against technical experimentation. . Vargas Llosa, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 14. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically. . Vargas Llosa’s prizes in this period were as follows: Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, in Spain, 1987; Premio Ritz París Hemingway, in France, 1985; Premio de Periodismo Ramón Godó Lallana, in Spain, 1979; Premio de la Crítica, in Argentina, 1981; Premio del Instituto Italo-Latinoameriano, in Italy, 1982. . See parts II and III for further discussion of demons and trauma in Vargas Llosa’s work. . Oviedo, “A Conversation with Mario Vargas Llosa about La tía Julia y el escribidor,” 155. . Julia Urquides Illanes, Lo que Varguitas no dijo [What Vargas Llosa didn’t say] (La Paz: Khana Cruz, 1985). . Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Avon, 1983). Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically. . For a discussion of readers and writers in this novel, see Carlos Alonso, “La tía Julia y el escribidor: The Writing Subject’s Fantasy of Empowerment,” PMLA 106 (Jan. 1991), and Williams, “La tía Julia y el escribidor: Escritores y lectores,” Texto crítico 5.13 (April–June 1979): 179–209. . Ricardo Setti, Diálogo con Vargas Llosa y otros ensayos y conferencias de Vargas Llosa, 83. . Ibid., 39. . Ibid., 40. . Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, Washington Post, Oct. 1, 1984, B2. . Ibid. . Ángel Rama, “La guerra del fin del mundo: Una obra maestra del fanatismo artístico.”

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« 214 » Notes to Pages 56–87 . Robert Stone, “Revolution as Ritual,” New York Times Book Review, Aug. 12, 1984, 1 and 24. . Bruce Allen, Christian Science Monitor Book Review, Oct. 5, 1984, B1. . Vargas Llosa, “The Latin-American Novel Today,” Books Abroad 44.1 (Winter 1970): 8. . Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands, 143. . Alfred MacAdam has compared the two texts in “Euclides da Cunha y Mario Vargas Llosa: Meditaciones intertextuales,” Revista Iberoamericana 126 (Jan.– March 1984): 157–164. See also Leopoldo Bernucci, A imitação dos sentidos: Prógonos, contemporâneos e epígonos de Euclides da Cunha. . Vargas Llosa, “Inquest in the Andes,” New York Times Magazine, July 31, 1983, 18–23. . Jorge Salazar, “La nueva novela de Mario Vargas Llosa,” Caretas, Nov. 19, 1984, 31. . Ibid. . Sara Castro Klarén, Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa, 206–222. . Álvaro Vargas Llosa, El diablo en campaña, 15. . Ibid., 19. . Diario de Irak (2003, with photographs by Morgana Vargas Llosa). Published only in Spanish and yet to be translated into English, this book consists of a series of journalistic accounts that the author wrote in Iraq from June 25 to July 6, 2003. These pieces appeared originally in newspapers in Europe and Latin America in August 2003. Throughout this book, Vargas Llosa comments upon a topic that has always interested him: the potential for creating a modern, democratic state with full protection of human rights in Latin America. Vargas Llosa uncovers the mechanisms for Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq and notes that often they are similar to what he had learned about the dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the focus of the novel La fiesta del Chivo. . Efraín Kristal, Temptation of the Word, 191. . Vargas Llosa, La utopía arcaica, 248 (“the restoration of a past mythically embellished with elements assimilated from the ‘dominant’ culture and the creative fantasy of writers and artists”; my translation). . Anonymous, “¿Es aquí el Paraíso?,” Revista de Libros 76 (June 2003). . El viaje a la ficción is his book on Juan Carlos Onetti, his admired friend from the 1960s. Among the Latin American writers whom Vargas Llosa has admired his entire adult life—a list that would include Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, and Alejo Carpentier—Julio Cortázar and Juan Carlos Onetti have a special place. On the basis of his early short stories, Cortázar had come to be admired throughout Latin America by the 1950s, and became amply recognized and translated beginning in the 1960s as part of the 1960s Boom. The Uruguayan Onetti, however, lived most of his life as a relatively obscure and unrecognized writer, despite having produced a body of work, beginning in the late 1930s, that has been quietly admired by many writers and, eventually, by a growing number of critics and scholars. Vargas

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Notes to Pages –

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Llosa’s book on Onetti appeared in 2008 and has not been translated into English. The real “crater” of the book, to use Vargas Llosa’s term for the unforgettable moment of a book, appears in the first section, “El viaje a la ficción.” In it, Vargas Llosa reveals more details about his 1958 trip to the Amazon, when he first heard about an hablador, a storyteller from a Machiguenga tribe. From this anecdote, Vargas Llosa claims that Onetti, like the hablador, had this special gift for telling exceptionally powerful stories. . Vargas Llosa made this declaration on national television in Mexico on Aug. 30, 1990. Octavio Paz had invited Vargas Llosa to a summit of intellectuals titled “Encuentro Vuelta, el Siglo XX: La experiencia de la libertad”; this statement shook the Mexican political establishment, including President Carlos Salinas de Gotari. . Public dialogue, Mario Vargas Llosa with Raymond L. Williams, Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, May 12, 2000. . I offer a more detailed narrative of Vargas Llosa’s Nobel week in the epilogue.

Part II . Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto is among the lighter of his “entertainments”; I will attempt to demonstrate that Travesuras de la niña mala is a more substantive entertainment than most of the novels in this category. . Jean Franco has discussed Borges as a writer interested in “privatized” experience in “The Utopia and the Tired Man,” in Critical Passions. . Vargas Llosa, Death in the Andes, 55. . Misha Kokotovic, “Vargas Llosa in the Andes: The Racial Discourse of Neoliberalism,” 158. . Deborah Cohn, “The Political Novels: The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and Death in the Andes,” 94. . See Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory; Vargas Llosa, Cartas a un joven novelista; Vargas Llosa, La tentación de lo imposible: Víctor Hugo y Los Miserables. . See ch. 8, “Omniscience,” in Culler’s The Literary in Theory. Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically. . Kristal, Temptation of the Word, 187–188. . Ibid., 188. . Roy C. Boland, “Ni de derecha ni de izquierda: La visión moral en las novelas de Mario Vargas Llosa,” 236. . Ibid., 237. . Cohn, “The Political Novels: The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and Death in the Andes,” 93. . See Williams, “The Dynamic Structure of El otoño del patriarca.”

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« 216 » Notes to Pages 98–116 . Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001), 3. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically. . See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History; Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (The Standard Edition), trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright, 1961); Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics; Aberbach, Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis; Judith Hehrman, Trauma and Recovery. . Clive Griffin, “The Dictator Novel: The Feast of the Goat,” 117–118. . Bell-Villada, “Sex, Politics, and High Art: Vargas Llosa’s Long Road to The Feast of the Goat,” in Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics, ed. Juan E. De Castro and Nicholas Birns (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 139–157. . Griffin, “The Dictator Novel: The Feast of the Goat,” 120. . Vargas Llosa, El paraíso en la otra esquina (Madrid: Aguilar, 2003): “Los marquesanos eran más espontáneos y libres que los tahitianos en asuntos sexuales” (339). . Vargas Llosa, The Way to Paradise, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 59; El paraíso en la otra esquina, 67–68. . Vargas Llosa, The Way to Paradise, 162. . Kristal, “From Utopia to Reconciliation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa, ed. Kristal and John King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 139. . Ibid. . It is Kristal who has called Ricardo “apolitical.” This does not correspond exactly with my characterization of him, as indicated in the body of this chapter; rather, I argue that Ricardo is in some ways apparently “apolitical,” but with nuances in his political interests. See Kristal, “From Utopia to Reconciliation.” . This quotation in the original Spanish reads as follows: “Cada uno de nosotros es, sucesivamente, no uno, sino muchos. Y estas personalidades sucesivas, que emergen las unas de las otras, suelen ofrecer entre sí los más raros y asombrosos contrastes.” . Vargas Llosa, El sueño del celta (Madrid: Aguilar, 2010), 43. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically. . Liesl Schillinger’s review of The Dream of the Celt, “Traitor, Martyr, Liberator,” New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2012, 11. . The key to Vargas Llosa’s understanding of the character came from Joseph Conrad’s biography of Casement. Some titles available to Vargas Llosa in his portrayal of Roger Casement include Robert Kee, The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism (New York: Penguin, 2001); W. J. McCormack, Roger Casement in Death; or, Haunting the Free State (Ireland: University College Dublin Press, 2003) (see this for an ample bibliography of additional titles). Soon after the appearance of El sueño del celta, Vargas Llosa’s publisher (Alfaguara) came forth with a volume of essays on the Congo, translated from the writings of G. W. Williams, Roger Casement, Ar-

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Notes to Pages –

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thur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain. See La tragedia del Congo: George W. Williams, Roger Casement, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2010). . Schillinger, “Traitor, Martyr, Liberator,” 11. . Kristal, “From Utopia to Reconciliation: The Way to Paradise, The Bad Girl, and The Dream of the Celt,” 142. . Ibid., 145. . Ibid., 146.

Part III . See Williams, “Two Organizing Principles in Pantaleón y las visitadoras.” . Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez have written on Cervantes in numerous essays, as well as speaking about him in numerous interviews. Fuentes wrote a book on Cervantes, Cervantes; o, La crítica de la lectura (Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1976). Juan Carlos Onetti and García Márquez have written and spoken repeatedly on Faulkner. . Vargas Llosa, “Prólogo,” Joanot Martorell, Carta de batalla por Tirant lo Blanc, 9. . Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc, ed. Rosa Giner and Joan Pellicer (Valencia: Eliseu Climent, 2005). The book originally appeared in Spanish in 1511, in Italian in 1538, and in English in 1984. . Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc, trans. David H. Rosenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 19. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically. . See the work of Cathy Caruth, David Aberbach, Judith Hehrman, and others on trauma and healing. . See Vargas Llosa, Viaje a la ficción, for the most detailed description of his first trip to the Amazon. . Major critics of the 1960s novels of Fuentes, García Márquez, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa have generally eschewed ecocritical approaches. Important studies of Cien años de soledad include Josefina Ludmer, Cien años de soledad: Una interpretación (Buenos Aires: Tiempo Contemporáneo, 1972); George McMurray, Gabriel García Márquez (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977); McMurray, ed., Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez (Boston: Hall, 1987); Ricardo Gullón, “Gabriel García Márquez and the Lost Art of Storytelling,” Diacritics 1.1 (1971): 27–32; Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Novedad y anacronismo en Cien años de soledad,” Revista Nacional de Cultura 29 (1968); Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971); Suzanne Jill Levine, El espejo hablado: Un estudio de Cien años de soledad (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1975); and Edward Waters Hood, La ficción de Gabriel García Márquez: Repetición e intertextualidad (New York: Lang, 1993). . The rise of ecocriticism is fundamentally a phenomenon of the 1990s, but can be traced back to the 1960s and works such as Rachel Carson’s classic Silent

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« 218 » Notes to Pages 135–141 Spring, originally published in 1962. Important critical bibliography of key works for ecocritical readings of literature include Leo Marx’s early study, The Machine in the Garden (1964); Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1974); Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience in American Life and Letters (1975); Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (1984); Steven Rosedale, The Greening of Literary Scholarship (2002). The third and most recent book by Lawrence Buell on this subject, The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), and other recent books, such as Practical Ecocriticism (2003) by Glen A. Love, are indicators that ecocriticism is a growing field. The aim of Love’s book is to initiate a more biologically informed ecocritical dialogue about literature and its relationship to nature and environmental concerns. . Early ecocriticism of the 1980s and early 1990s (now referred to as the “fi rst wave”) placed emphasis on the nonhuman over the human. The definition of ecocriticism offered by the editors of the special issue of New Literary History is as follows: “challenges interpretation of its own grounding in the bedrock of natural fact, in the biosphere and indeed planetary conditions without which human life, much less humane letters, could not exist. Ecocriticism thus claims as its hermeneutic horizon nothing short of the literal horizon itself, the finite environment that a reader or writer occupies thanks not just to culturally coded determinants but also to natural determinants that antedate these, and will outlast them” (Herbert  F. Tucker, “From the Editors,” New Literary History 3 [1999]: 505). . Jennifer French, Nature, Neocolonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers, 7. . See McMurray, “The Role of Climate in Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction,” in Climate and Literature: Reflections on the Environment, ed. Janet Pérez and Wendell Aycock (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1995), 55–72. . Patricia Struebig, “Nature and Sexuality in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Selecta: Journal of the Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages 5 (1984): 60. . I have studied Cien años de soledad in the context of the modern in A Companion to Gabriel García Márquez. . See Ursula K. Heise, “Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place,” Comparative Literature Studies 41.1 (2004): 126–152. . Bell-Villada, Gabriel García Márquez: The Man and His Work (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). . The two books discussed here are Alexander Von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative (New York: Penguin, 1996) and Cosmos (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1850). All quotations are from these editions. . Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1970), 68. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically. . Vargas Llosa, The Green House, 19. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically.

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Notes to Pages –

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. Cohn, “The Political Novels: The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and Death in the Andes,” 88–92. . Jonathan Tittler, “Ecological Criticism and Spanish American Fiction,” in Adrian Taylor Kane, ed., The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth-Century Writing (North Carolina: McFarland, 2010), 11–36. . See Buell, Environmental Imagination, ch. 9. . Fiona J. Mackintosh, “Innocence and Corruption: Who Killed Palomino Molero? and The Storyteller,” in Kristal and King, 80. . Tittler, “Ecological Criticism and Spanish American Fiction,” 29. . Vargas Llosa, El hablador (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987), 94. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically. . When I speak of “orality,” I refer to “primary orality” as defined by Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy, ch. 2. . Vargas Llosa, El sueño del celta, 59. . My ecocritical reading of Vargas Llosa has been improved by discussions in a graduate seminar on modern Latin American fiction (selected texts of Vargas Llosa and Mexican writers) offered at the University of California, Riverside, in fall 2012. Graduate students Diana Dodson Lee and Charles Stuart provided useful insights for this ecocritical rereading. . The term novela total was popularized in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s by numerous critics, but important early sources were Fuentes’s La nueva narrativa hispanoamericana (1969) and Vargas Llosa’s own García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (1971). . Personal interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, Madrid, July 4, 2011. See the appendix. . Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xvii. . Steven Conner, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 107. . Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 36. . Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 39. . Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 49. . See Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). . Keith Booker, Vargas Llosa among the Postmodernists, 23. . Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal and Carlos Feal, Painting and the Page, 197. . Ibid., 21.

Epilogue . My first book-length critical study was in English, Mario Vargas Llosa (1986). The second book, Vargas Llosa: Historia de un deicidio (2000), began as a

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« 220 » Notes to Pages 187–199 biography and was started in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Instead of being a biography, however, in its final form it was a book in Spanish modeled after Vargas Llosa’s García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio. This was also my first attempt at writing about Vargas Llosa using some of his own critical concepts. The present study in English is a follow-up, focusing on the twenty-first century but with that same idea. Thus I have mentioned some of Vargas Llosa’s concepts, such as “crater,” “communicating vessels,” and the like, as well as utilizing concepts from narratology and readings in trauma and literature. . This conversation appeared in print under the title “Mario Vargas Llosa on D.H. Lawrence: An Interview,” by Fletcher Fairey, in Williams, ed., The Novel in the Americas, 151–156. . Participants in this faculty seminar at Washington University in St. Louis included William H. Gass, David May Distinguished University Professor, Philosophy and English, whose most recent book at the time of the faculty seminar was Habitations of the Word (1985); Michel Rybalka, professor of French, who taught contemporary French literature, writing extensively on Vargas Llosa’s former idol, Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as on Boris Vian and Alain Robbe-Grillet; Richard Watson, professor of philosophy and author of philosophical studies and creative work; and Richard J. Walter, professor of Latin American history. . Much of the conversation in the faculty seminar was recorded and published later as an interview; see “The Boom Twenty Years Later: An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa.” . Ibid., 205. . Jean O’Bryan-Knight, “Let’s Make Owners and Entrepreneurs: Glimpses of Free Marketeers in Vargas Llosa’s Novels,” in Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics, ed. J. E. DeCastro and Nicholas Birns (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 47–68. . For this observation on Hayek, I am indebted to retired professor of philosophy Arthur Flemming (unpublished interview, Dec. 1, 2012). . Williams, “Mario Vargas Llosa Interviewed on the Mississippi: Pilgrimage to Oxford.” . García Márquez explains his use of a single image for structuring his novels in Williams, “The Visual Arts, the Poetization of Space, and Writing: An Interview with Gabriel Gárcia Márquez,” PMLA 104 (1989): 131–140.

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Works Cited

Books Aberbach, David. Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Armas Marcelo, Juan Jesus. El vicio de escribir. 2nd ed. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Baudelaire, Charles. Baudelaire: Selected Poems. Trans. and ed. Joanna Richardson. New York: Penguin, 1975. Beachesne, Kim, and Alesandra Santos. The Utopian Impulse in Latin America. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Béjar, Héctor. Peru, 1965: Notes on a Guerrilla Experience. London: London Review Press, 1970. Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bernucci, Leopoldo. A imitacão dos sentidos: Prógonos, contemporâneos e epígonos de Euclides da Cunha. São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 1995. Boland, Roy. Mario Vargas Llosa: Oedipus and the Papa State. Madrid: Voz, 1988. Boland, Roy C., and Inger Enkvist, eds. Specular Narratives: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Mario Vargas Llosa. Antípodas, special issue, 8– 9 (1996–1997). Bonnemaison, Joel. Culture and Space: Conceiving a New Geography. London: Torris, 2005. Booker, Keith. Vargas Llosa among the Postmodernists. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994. Brown, Michael F. Twewa’s Gift: Magic and Meaning in Amazonian Society. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

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« 222 » Mario Vargas Llosa ———. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Castro-Klarén, Sara. Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Collazos, Oscar, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura: Polémica. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1970. Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Da Cunha, Euclides. Rebellion in the Backlands. Trans. Samuel Putnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. De Castro, Juan E., and Nicholas Birns, eds. Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Donoso, José. Historia personal del “Boom.” With appendices by the author and María Pilar Serrano. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1972. Fenwick, M. J. Dependency Theory and Literary Analysis: Reflections on Vargas Llosa’s The Green House. Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1981. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trans. Frederic Will. New York: Pocket Books, 2007. Franco, Jean. Critical Passions: Selected Essays. Ed. Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. French, Jennifer L. Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers. Lebanon, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2005. Fuentes, Carlos. La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969. García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien anos de soledad. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1970. ———. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Geisdorfer Feal, Rosemary. Novel Lives: The Fictional Autobiographies of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Mario Vargas Llosa. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, Department of Romance Languages, 1986. Geisdorfer Feal, Rosemary, and Carlos Leal. Painting and the Page. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972. González, Aníbal. Killer Books: Writing, Violence, and Ethics in Modern Spanish American Narrative. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. González Echevarría, Roberto. The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Hehrman, Judith J. Trauma and Recovery. Baltimore: Basic Books, 1992.

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Hood, Edward. La ficción de Gabriel García Márquez: Repetición e intertextualidad. New York: Lang, 1993. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. ———. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Kane, Adrian Taylor, ed. The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritial Essays on Twentieth-Century Writing. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010. Kolodny, Anette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Kristal, Efraín. The Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Kristal, Efraín, and John King, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Lindstrom, Naomi. The Social Conscience of Latin American Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. ———. Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Lutwack, Leonard. The Role of Place in Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Theory and History of Literature 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970. Mariátegui, José Carlos. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Lima: Amauta, 1969. Martorell, Joanot. Tirant lo Blanc. Trans. David H. Rosenthal. New York: Schocken Books, 1984. [In the original Catalán: Joanot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc, ed. Rosa Giner and Joan Pellicer (Valencia: Eliseu Climent, 2005).] McLintock, Cynthia, and Abraham F. Lowenthal. The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Millicent, Todd. Peru: A Land of Contrasts. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1914. Moreno-Durán, R. H. Como el halcón peregrino. Bogota: Aguilar, 1995. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Ortega, Julio. La contemplación y la fiesta. Caracas: Monte Avila, 1969. ———. La cultura peruana: Experiencia y conciencia. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1978. Oviedo, José Miguel, ed. Mario Vargas Llosa: El escritor y la crítica. Madrid: Taurus, 1981. ———. Mario Vargas Llosa: La invención de una realidad. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970 and 1982.

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« 224 » Mario Vargas Llosa Perez, Janet, and Wendell Aycock, eds. Climate and Literature: Reflections of Environment. Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1995. Pike, Frederick B. The Politics of the Miraculous in Peru: Haya de la Torre and the Spiritualist Tradition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Rama, Ángel. La ciudad letrada. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1984. Rama, Ángel, and Mario Vargas Llosa. García Márquez y la problemática de la novela. Montevideo: Corregidor-Marcha, 1973. Rivera, José Eustacio. La vorágine. Mexico: Porrúa, 1976. Robinson, David A. Peru in Four Dimensions. Lima: American Studies Press, 1964. Rosendale, Steven. The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Rossman, Charles, and Alan Warren Friedman, eds. Mario Vargas Llosa. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, special issue 19.4 (Winter 1977). ———, eds. Mario Vargas Llosa: A Collection of Critical Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978. Setti, Ricardo. Diálogo con Vargas Llosa y otros ensayos y conferencias de Vargas Llosa. San José, Costa Rica: Kosmos, 1988. Shaw, Donald. Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana: Boom, Postboom, Postmodernismo. Madrid: Cátedra, 1999. Silva Tuesta, Max. Mario Vargas Llosa: Interpretación de una vida. Lima: San Marcos, 2012. Solares Solano, Humberto. Historia, espacio, sociedad: Cochabamba, 1550–1950. Cochabamba: Serrano, 1990. Stein, Steve. Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses and Politics of Social Control. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. Tristán, Flora. Peregrinaciones de una paria, 1833–1834. Arequipa: El Lector, 2003. Vargas Llosa, Álvaro. El diablo en campaña. Madrid: El País, 1991. Williams, Raymond L. The Colombian Novel, 1844–1987. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. ———. A Companion to Gabriel García Márquez. Suffolk: Tamesis, 2010. ———. Mario Vargas Llosa. New York: Ungar, 1987. ———, ed. The Novel in the Americas. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1992. ———. The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. ———. Vargas Llosa: Otra historia de un deicidio. Mexico: UNAM/Alfaguara, 2000. ———. The Writings of Carlos Fuentes. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Articles Alonso, Carlos. “La tía Julia y el escribidor: The Writing Subject’s Fantasy of Empowerment.” PMLA 106 (Jan. 1991).

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Bell-Villada, Gene H. “The Inventions and Reinventions of Mario Vargas Llosa.” Salmagundi 153–154 (Winter–Spring 2007): 148–167. Boland, Roy C. “Ni de derecha ni de izquierda: La visión moral en las novelas de Mario Vargas Llosa.” In Specular Narratives: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Mario Vargas Llosa, ed. Roy C. Boland and Inger Enkvist, 230– 240. Special issue, Antípodas 8–9 (1996–1997). Buell, Lawrence. “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics.” In Ethics and Literary Study, ed. Lawrence Buell. Special issue, PMLA 114 (1999): 7–19. Cohn, Deborah. “The Political Novels: The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and Death in the Andes.” In The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa, ed. Efraín Kristal and John King, 88–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Davis, Mary. “Mario Vargas Llosa: The Necessary Scapegoat.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19.4 (Winter 1977): 530–544. Fairey, Fletcher. “Mario Vargas Llosa on D.H. Lawrence: An Interview.” In The Novel in the Americas, ed. Raymond L. Williams, 151–156. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1992. Foster, David William. “Consideraciones estructurales sobre La casa verde.” Norte 12.5–6 (Oct.–Dec. 1971): 128–135. Franco, Jean. “Conversations and Confessions: Self and Character in The Fall and Conversation in The Cathedral.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19.4 (Winter 1977): 452–468. Fuentes, Carlos. “El afán totalizante de Vargas Llosa.” In La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 35–48. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969. Griffin, Clive. “The Dictator Novel: The Feast of the Goat.” In The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa, ed. Efraín Kristal and John King, 116–128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kokotovic, Misha. “Vargas Llosa in the Andes: The Racial Discourse of Neoliberalism.” Confluencias 15.2 (Spring 2000): 156–167. O’Bryan-Knight, Jean. “Let’s Make Owners and Entrepeneurs: Glimpses of Free Marketeers in Vargas Llosa’s Novels.” In Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics, ed. J. E. De Castro and Nicholas Birns, 47–68. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Ong, Walter. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90.1 (Jan. 1975). Oviedo, José Miguel. “Conversacíon con Mario Vargas Llosa sobre La tía Julia y el escribidor.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19.4 (Winter 1977): 546–559. ———. “A Conversation with Mario Vargas Llosa about La tía Julia y el escribidor.” In Mario Vargas Llosa: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Charles Rossman and Alan Friedman, 151–165. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978. Poniatowska, Elena. Interview: “Al fin, un escritor que le apasiona escribir, no lo que se diga de sus libros.” ¡Siempre! La cultura en Mexico, July 6, 1965, 2–7. Rama, Ángel. “La guerra del fin del mundo: Una obra maestra del fanatismo artístico.” Eco 246 (April 1982): 600–639. Santamaría, Haydeé. “Respuesta a Mario Vargas Llosa.” Casa de las Américas 11.65– 66 (1971).

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Schillinger, Liesl. “Traitor, Martyr, Liberator” (review of The Dream of the Celt), New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2012: 11. Vargas Llosa, Mario. “On Being Nine and First Seeing the Sea.” In A Writer’s Reality. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993. ———. “Elogio de la lectura y la ficción.” Madrid: Alfaguara, 2010. ———. “Inquest in the Andes.” New York Times Magazine, July 31, 1983, 18–23. ———. “The Latin-American Novel Today.” Books Abroad 44.1 (Winter 1970): 7–16. ———. “La literatura es fuego.” In Contra viento y marea (1962–1982), 132–137. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983. ———. “Prólogo.” Joanot Martorell, Carta de batalla por Tirant lo Blanc. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969. ———. “Prologue.” The Cubs and Other Stories. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Williams, Raymond L. “The Boom Twenty Years Later: An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa.” In The Boom in Retrospect: A Reconsideration, ed. Yvette Miller and Raymond L. Williams, 201–206. Special issue, Latin American Literary Review 15.29 (Jan.–June 1987). ———. “The Dynamic Structure of El otoño del patriarca.” Symposium 32.1 (1978): 56–73. ———. “Mario Vargas Llosa Interviewed on the Mississippi: Pilgrammage to Oxford.” River Stix 22 (1987): 34–40. ———. “La tía Julia y el escribidor: Escritores y lectores.” Texto crítico 5.13 (April– June 1979): 179–209. ———. “Two Organizing Principles in Pantaleón y las visitadoras.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19.4 (Winter 1977). ———. “The Visual Arts, the Poetization of Space, and Writing: An Interview with Gabriel García Márquez.” PMLA (March 1989).

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Index

Aberbach, David, viii, 212, 217; Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis, viii “abuelo, El,” 19 Adán, Martín, 151–152; La casa de cartón, 151 Aguarunas, 21, 28 Alegría, Ciro, 5, 6; El mundo es ancho y ajeno, 6 Aleixandre, Vicente, vii Alonso, Dámoso, 124 Alvarado, Velasco, 71 Ángel Asturias, Miguel, vii, 25, 150–151; El Señor Presidente, 151 Angélico, Fra, 75 Bacon, Francis, 75; Cabeza I, 75 Bader, Malcom, xi Bakhtin, Mikhail, 152, 221; The Dialogic Imagination, 221 Balsells, Carmen, 38, 44 Balzac, Honoré de, 51–52, 67, 188, 197 Barcha, Mercedes (García Márquez’s wife), 44 Barne, Julian, 167; Flaubert’s Parrot, 167 Barral, Carlos, 25 Barthes, Roland, 74, 127 Bass, Arnold, xi

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Baudelaire, Charles, 150, 221; Baudelaire: Selected Poems, 221; “The Painter in Modern Life,” 150 Baudillard, Jean, 163–164 Beauvoir, Simone de, 24, 33 Bedoya, Rosario de, x Béjar, Héctor, 34; Peru, 1965: Notes on a Guerilla Experience, 221 Belaúnde Terry, Fernando, 34, 62, 71 Bell Villada, Gene, 100, 137, 212, 216, 218, 225; Gabriel García Márquez: The Man and His Work, 137, 218; “The Inventions and Reinventions of Mario Vargas Llosa,” 212, 225; “Sex, Politics, and High Art: Vargas Llosa’s Long Road to The Feast of the Goat,” 216 Benavente, Jacinto, vii Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 140; La invención de Morel, 140 Birns, Nicholas, viii; Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics (coeditor), viii, 216, 220, 222, 225 Blanco, Hugo, 33, 72 Bolaño, Roberto, 115, 201; 2666, 115, 201 Boll, Heinrich, 76 Booker, Keith, 167–168, 219, 221; Vargas Llosa among the Postmodernists, 219, 221

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« 228 » Mario Vargas Llosa Boom (of the 1960s), viii, 3, 18, 25, 32, 34–38, 44–46, 51, 74, 91, 113, 118, 122, 126, 143, 152, 186, 191, 200–201, 212– 214, 220, 222, 224, 226 Borges, Jorge Luis, 25, 61, 74, 92, 125, 127–128, 140; The Circular Ruins, 165; Ficciones, 140, 151, 164–166, 187, 214– 215; El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 165 Boucher, François, 75 Buell, Lawrence, 134, 144, 218–219, 221, 228; The Environmental Imagination, 134, 219, 221; “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics,” 225; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 188; Sons and Lovers, 188–189; Women in Love, 188–189 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 166, 222; Tres Tristes Tigres, 166 cacharros, Los, 32, 207–208 Calvino, Italo, 74 Camus, Albert, 19, 24, 42–43, 76, 175; The Fall, 42 Carpentier, Alejo, 25, 45, 150–151, 214 Cartas a un joven novelista, 183, 209, 215 casa verde, La, viii, 7, 9, 13, 19, 20–21, 2731, 33, 37, 41, 43, 47–48, 59, 61–62, 64, 67, 69, 79–80, 91, 93, 95–97, 104, 108– 111, 113- 116, 118, 121, 132, 135–136, 140– 142, 144–145, 148–154, 156–158, 160, 165–166, 191, 199–200, 202 Castellet, José María, 25 Castro, Fidel, 24, 33, 45–46, 77, 133 Castro-Klarén, 69, 214, 222; Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa, 214, 222 Catholic Church, 8, 16, 112, 121 Catholicism, 112, 115, 117 Cela, Camilo José, vii, 50 Cervantes, Miguel de, 122–123, 177, 217; Don Quixote, 123 Chesterton, G. K., 113 Chunga, La, 63, 153, 212

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ciudad y los perros, La, viii, ix, 11, 22– 27, 31, 33, 41, 43, 62, 64, 93, 95, 108, 122, 131–132, 134, 156, 158, 177, 191, 200, 207, 224 Cohn, Deborah, 94, 96, 215, 219, 225; “The Political Novels: The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and Death in the Andes,” 215, 219, 225 Coindreau, Maurice, 196 Colegio de la Salle, 173 Conner, Steve, 151, 219; Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, 219 Conrad, Joseph, 20, 113, 116, 119, 181, 204, 216; Heart of Darkness, 204 Conversación en La Catedral, viii, ix, 14, 32, 36, 38–39, 42–43, 46–47, 56, 59, 61, 64–65, 88, 93, 97, 104, 115, 118, 132, 150–152, 157–158, 160, 163, 165, 200– 201, 207–208, 213 Cortázar, Julio, vii, 24, 33, 50, 142, 149, 165–166, 186, 191–192, 197, 212, 214, 222; Almanach Hachette, 143; Rayuela, 37, 45, 135, 142–143, 149, 165 cuadernos de don Rigoberto, Los, x, 46, 87, 116, 121, 131, 163, 168–169, 207– 208, 215 Cuban Revolution, 24, 44–46, 108, 143 Cueto, Alfonso, 176 Cullenberg, Stephen, xi Culler, Jonathan, 92, 95, 215, 222; The Literary in Theory, 95, 215, 222 Cunha, Euclides da, 56, 59, 214, 221, 222; Rebellion in the Backlands, 56, 57, 214, 222 Cunningham Graham, Robert, 113 Darío, Rubén, 22 Davis, Mary, 43, 225; “Mario Vargas Llosa: The Necessary Scapegoat,” 213, 225 De Castro, Juan E., viii; Vargas Llosa

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Index and Latin American Politics (coeditor), viii, 216, 220, 222, 225 demons (demonios), 23, 51, 112, 121, 128, 131, 133, 167, 183, 192, 198, 200 “desafío, El,” 19 de Silva, Alfonso, 24 de Szyszlo, Fernando, 75, 77, 171, 189 Dodson Lee, Diana, xi, 219 Donoso, José, vii, 44, 47, 212; Historia personal del “Boom,” 44 Dos Passos, John, 76 Dostoyevksy, Fyodor, 23 Dumas, Alexandre, 13, 23, 54, 58 Durán, Augusto, 2 Echegaray, José, vii Eco, Umberto, 165 ecocriticism, 134–135, 137, 142, 217–218; in Cien años de soledad, 137; in Rayuela, 142; in Silent Spring, 217 Edwards, Jorge, 77 Element añadido, 27, 31, 123 Eliot, T. S., 150, 152 “Elogio de la lectura y la ficción,”173, 226 Elogio de la madrastra, 46, 50, 74–75, 78, 87, 89, 121, 131, 163, 165, 168–169, 190, 207–208 Englund, Peter, vii, 177 Faulkner, William, 6, 15, 23, 26–28, 31, 33, 43, 46, 67, 69, 76, 89, 122, 149–150, 158, 172, 174, 178, 184, 187–189, 194– 196, 217; Absalom, Absalom!, 6; As I Lay Dying, 198; Light in August, 196– 197; Mosquitoes, 197; Sanctuary, 43, 196; The Sound and the Fury, 197; These Thirteen, 196; The Wild Palms, 184 Feal, Carlos, 219; Painting and the Page, 219 Fernando, prince of Portugal, 124–125 Ferreira, César, xi

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« 229 »

fiesta del Chivo, La, ix, 57, 87–88, 91–93, 97–98, 100–102, 104, 110, 115, 118, 121, 148–150, 152, 160, 163, 178, 186, 200– 201, 204, 207–208, 214 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 76 Flaubert, Gustave, 23, 222; Madame Bovary, 23, 222 Flemming, Arthur, xi, 220 Franco, Jean, 213; “Conversations and Confessions: Self and Character in The Fall and Conversation in The Cathedral,” 42, 92, 215 Frank, Arthur W., 216; The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illnesses, and Ethics, viii, 216, 222 French, Jennifer, 135, 218; Nature, Neocolonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers, 135, 218 Fresán, Rodrigo, 201; Mantra, 201 Freud, Sigmund, viii, 216; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, viii, 216 Fuentes, Carlos, vii, xi, 3, 16, 25, 55, 184, 186, 190–191, 193, 199–200, 212, 217, 219, 221, 224–225; La nueva narrativa hispanoamericana, 37, 219 Fujimori, Alberto, 50, 79, 86 Gallagher, David, 176 Gallegos, Rómulo, 37, 139; Doña Barbara, 139 Galsworthy, John, 113 Ganim, John, xi García, Alan, 68, 71–73, 76, 176 García Márquez, Gabriel, vii, viii, 3, 35– 38, 44–45, 47, 50, 74, 88, 92–93, 95, 98, 115, 120, 135–138, 140, 149–150, 152, 164, 166, 171–172, 186, 191, 193, 199, 201, 209, 212, 217–220, 222–224, 226; Cien años de soledad, 35, 38, 115, 135, 137, 138, 140, 149–150; La increíble y triste historia de la cándida eréndira, 47; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 164; El otoño del patriarca, 88

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« 230 » Mario Vargas Llosa García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, 44, 209, 212, 217 Garmendia, Salvador, 45 Gass, William H., 190–192, 220 Geisdorfer Feal, Rosemary, 168, 219, 222; Novel Lives: The Fictional Autobiographies of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Mario Vargas Llosa, 222; Painting and the Page, 219 Georgetown University, 86 Ghezzi, María Carmen, x Giner, Rosa, 124, 217, 223; Tirant lo Blanc (editor), 217, 223 Góngora, Luis de, 76 Griffin, Clive, 99, 215–216; “The Dictator Novel: The Feast of the Goat,” 216, 225 guerra del fin del mundo, La, 38, 50, 54– 62, 64–65, 69, 93, 96–97, 100, 110, 115, 121, 132–133, 150, 152, 160, 162–163, 165, 199, 207–208, 213, 225 Guimarães, João, 136; Grande Sertão: Veredas, 136 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 37; Don Segundo Sombra, 139 Guzmán, Abimael, 72 Hablador, El, 19, 20, 50, 63, 65, 68–70, 74–75, 109, 122, 131, 134, 145–148, 207–208 Hehrman, Judith, viii, 216–217, 222; Trauma and Recovery, viii, 216 Heise, Ursula, 137, 218; “Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place,” 218 Hemingway, Ernest, 128, 213 Heraud, Javier, 24, 33, 72 Hernán, Vidal, viii Herzberger, David, xi Historia de Mayta, 9, 24, 34, 62, 65, 67, 97, 100, 131–134, 143–146, 148–149, 163, 165. 167, 169, 190, 207–208

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Historia secreta de una novela, 37, 209, 211–212 Huambisas, 21, 28 Hugo, Victor, 12, 13, 17, 23–24, 79, 82–83, 95, 159, 187, 209–210, 215; Les Misérables, 12, 79, 82, 95, 149, 210 huida del Inca, La, 13, 63 Huidobro, Vicente, 151 Hutcheon, Linda, 164–166, 219, 223; A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, 164, 219, 223; The Politics of Postmodernism, 164 indigenismo, 81–82, 209 Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, 178, 183, 215 Jameson, Frederic, 151–152, 163–164, 166, 219, 223; The Political Unconscious, 152 Jaramillo, Darío, x jefes, Los, 19, 22 Jesus Christ, 124 “Joanot Martorell y el elemento añadido en Tirant lo Blanc,” 123 Johnson, Peter T., x José María Arguedas, viii, 5, 70, 79, 80– 82, 85, 209 Joyce, James, 76, 150, 152, 166, 198 Kafka, Franz, 150 Kathie y el hipopótamo, 63–65, 68, 212 King’s College, 38 Knox, Robert, x, 202 Kristal, Efraín, viii, 80, 96, 107, 116, 214, 225; The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa (coeditor), 225; Temptation of the Word, 214 Leavis, F. R., 188 Leoncio Prado Military School, 11, 13,

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Index 19, 22–23, 25–26, 28, 71, 131, 149, 176 Leónidas Trujillo, Rafael, 9, 12, 87–88, 97–99, 118, 214 Lessing, Doris, 76 “literatura es fuego, La,” 34, 226 Lituma en los Andes, ix, 80, 91, 93–96, 100–101, 104, 120, 122, 131–132, 200, 207–208 Llosa, Patricia, x, 32–33, 36, 44, 55, 67– 68, 71, 77, 79, 89, 171, 175, 180, 185–186, 194, 201, 203 Llosa Bustamente, Pedro, 3–4, 77 Llosa de Rivera, Belisario, 3–4 Llosa y Llaguno, Juan de la, 2–3 Loayza, Luis, 18, 21, 23–24 López Portillo, José, 95 Luchting, Wolfgang A., x. 36 Lynch, Benito, 135; El ingles de los huesos, 135 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 163, 164, 219, 223; The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 163 Macondo, 92, 137–138 Malraux, André, 188, 196 Mann, Thomas, 76 Mao, 21, 72 María Arguedas, José, 70, 80–81, 209 Mariategui, José Carlos, 16, 17, 35, 72, 223; Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, 17 Martorell, Joanot, 122, 123–127, 129, 149, 184–185, 209, 217, 223, 226; Tirant lo Blanc, 123, 217, 223 Marx, Karl, 15–17, 33, 194 Marxist, 39, 55, 66, 152, 175 Matos Mar, José, 28 McMurray, George, 136–137, 217–218; Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez (editor), 217; Gabriel García Márquez, 217; The Role of Climate

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in Twentieth Century Spanish American Fiction, 218 McRobie, Angela, 166, 219; Postmodernism and Popular Culture, 219 Miller, Henry, 188 Mills, C. Wright, 152 Milofsky, David, 178 Miserachs, Xavier, 32 Mistral, Gabriela, vii, 172 modernism, 164, 166, 202 Morales Bermúdez, Francisco, 71 Moreira César, Colonel Antonio, 58 Moreno-Durán, R. H., x, 223 Muñoz Nájar, Lucía, x Nabokov, Vladimir, 167; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 167 Neruda, Pablo, 92–93, 172; Canto General, 92 Nobel Prize for Literature, vii, x, 6, 50, 79–80, 89, 110, 151, 171, 175, 177–180, 186, 203–204 novela en América Latina, La: Diálogo, 36 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 80, 87 Oquendo, Abelardo, 21; Literatura, 21 Oquendo de Amat, Carlos, 34 Ordaens, Jacob, 75 orgía perpetua, La: Flaubert y Madame Bovary, 23, 128, 209 Oveido, José Miguel, vii, x, 55, 176, 200, 211, 223, 225; “Conversación con Mario Vargas Llosa sobre La tia Julia y el escribidor,” 225; Mario Vargas Llosa: El escritor y la critica, 223; Mario Vargas Llosa: La invención de una realidad, vii, 211 Pacheco, José Emilio, 169; Morirás lejos, 169 Padilla, Herberto, 46

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Pantaleón y las visitadoras, 38, 44, 46– 51, 61–62, 64, 69, 87–88, 104, 107, 115– 116, 121, 127, 132–133, 207–208, 217, 226 paraíso en la otra esquina, El, ix, 81, 84, 91–92, 101–104, 110–111, 117, 122, 134, 178, 182, 204, 207–208, 216 Pasternak, Boris, 76 Paz, Octavio, vii, 50, 192, 215 Pérez Galdós, Benito, 95 Petit, Juan, 25 pez en el agua, El, 80, 187, 209, 211–212 Pillicer, Joan, 124 Poma de Ayala, Guaman, 82 Popper, Karl, 76, 78 Postboom, 47, 224 postmodernism, 54, 74, 92, 104, 119, 149, 163–169 Princeton University, x, 80, 177 Proust, Marcel, 150 Puig, Manuel, 166; La traición de Rita Hayworth, 166 Queen Mary University of London, 32 ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, 46, 50, 65, 67, 79–80, 87, 116, 121, 131, 207–208 Quiroga, Horacio, 135 Rabassa, Gregory, 44, 207, 222 Rama, Ángel, viii, 3, 34, 44, 56, 213 Revel, Jean François, 77 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 183 Rivera, José Eustasio, 135, 139; La vorágine, 135, 139–140, 147, 149, 224 Rivera Garza, Cristina, 201 Rodó, José Enrique, 110; Motivos de Proteo, 110 Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, 33, 44, 217; “Novedad y anacronismo en Cien años de soledad,” 217 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 67 Rulfo, Juan, viii, 214

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Salas-Durazo, Enrique, xi Salazar Bondy, Sebastián, 21, 25; “Mao Tse Tung between Poetry and Revolution,” 21–22 Sánchez, Nestor, 166; Siberia Blues, 166 Sánchez, Rafael, 166; La guaracha de Macho Gamacho, 166 Sanchez Cerro, Luis M., 7–9, 12 Sarduy, Severo, 166; Cobra, 166 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15, 19, 23–24, 33–36, 42–43, 51, 81, 175, 198, 220; The Reprieve, 42 Schillinger, Liesl, 115, 116, 216; “Traitor, Martyr, Liberator,” 216 Schneider, Thomas, xi Seix Barral, Víctor, 25 señorita de Tacna, La, 55, 63, 212 sexuality, 10, 11, 110, 111, 122, 117, 131–132, 137, 167, 168–169 Shakras, 21, 28 Shaw, George Bernard, 113, 127 Skármeta, Antonio, 47 Soto, Hernando, 73, 193; El otro sendero, 73, 193 Souza, Raymond D., xi Steinbeck, John, 76 Struebig, Patricia, 137, 218; “Nature and Sexuality in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” 218 Stuart, Charles, xi, 219 sueño del celta, El, vii, ix, 20–21, 36, 81, 85–86, 91, 93, 109–111, 113, 115–119, 141, 148–150, 152, 160, 163, 177–178, 181– 182, 186, 191, 200–201, 204–205, 207– 208, 216, 219 Swedish Academy, vii, 173, 177–178, 205 tentación de lo imposible, La: Victor Hugo y Los Misérables, 12, 82, 209– 210, 215 terra (land), 135–136 tía Julia y el escribidor, La, 166

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Index Tittler, Jonathan, 144–146, 219; “Ecological Criticism and Spanish American Fiction,” 219 Tolstoy, Leo, 17, 23, 59, 149; War and Peace, 149 Torre de Babel, La, 55 Torres Bodet, Jaime, 151; Primero de enero, 151 Toscana, David, 201 total novel, 12, 38, 46–47, 58, 65, 69, 88, 93, 101, 110, 114–116, 121, 149–150, 152, 157, 160, 184, 201, 213 transculturation, viii Travesuras de la niña mala, ix, 33, 87, 91, 104–105, 107, 109, 111, 115–116, 120–121, 178, 200, 204, 207–208, 215 Twain, Mark, 67, 127, 199, 217 University of Puerto Rico, 37 Ureta de Llosa, Carmen, 4 Ureta Llosa, Dora, 1, 4, 5–6, 10 utopía arcaica, La: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo, 81–82, 209, 214 Valenzuela, Luisa, 47 Valverde, José María, 25 Vargas, Dora de. See Ureta Llosa, Dora Vargas, Germán, x–xi Vargas, Marcelo, 1 Vargas Llosa, Mario: academic work of, at Cambridge University, 51, 80; academic work of, at Complutense University, 22; academic work of, at Harvard University, 80; academic work of, at King’s College, 38; academic work of, at Queen Mary University of London, 32; academic work of, at Real Academia Española de la Lengua, 86; academic work of, at University of Puerto Rico, 38; academic work of, at Washington University, 36–37, 67, 190, 194, 199, 201–

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202; adolescent years of, 15–19, 22; break of, with the Left, 81, 133; and the concept of “communicating vessels” (vasos comunicativos), x, 69, 74, 93, 97–99, 101–104, 114, 118, 145, 162–163, 184, 220; divorce of, 32; education of, at Colegio San Miguel, 25–26, 28; education of, at Leoncio Prado Military School, 11–13, 15, 19– 20, 22–23, 71, 131, 149, 176; early life of, 4–7, 9–13; early work of, while at school and university, 15; and fanaticism, 61–62, 96; and the free market economy, 50, 78, 193, 220, 225; and the Left, ix, 17, 22, 24–25, 34, 39, 45, 81, 104, 108–109, 113, 133; marriages of, 18, 32; narrative technique, 28, 31, 48, 56, 61, 102, 119, 123, 129–130, 155, 158, 189; Nobel Prize acceptance lecture of, 89, 117, 172–175, 210; and the Nobel Prize in Literature, vii, x, 6, 79–80, 89, 110, 117, 151, 171, 177–180, 186, 203–204, 215; presidential campaign of, 74, 78–79, 91, 206, 211; and socialism, 5, 72, 193 Vargas Llosa, Mario, themes of: the father, 62, 132; historiographic metafiction, 165; indigenous life, ix, 2, 5– 6, 16–17, 20–21, 28–30, 62–63, 69–70, 72, 82, 85, 89, 94, 96, 114, 132, 135, 138, 141, 146–147, 154, 156, 174; machismo, 49, 157, 211; power, 45, 88, 98, 113, 118, 120, 132, 165, 211; rebellion, 14, 18, 56– 57, 65, 100, 117, 133; reconciliation, 117, 216–217; social and political commentary, 49, 66, 71, 101, 105, 110–111, 119, 133–134, 139, 153, 157–158, 167–168, 173, 185; utopias, 81–86, 94, 101–105, 109–110, 121, 151, 170, 172, 182, 209, 214–217, 221; violence, 52, 58, 65, 80, 96, 100, 103–104, 107, 114, 123, 125, 130 Vargas Llosa, Mario, works of. See under titles of works

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Vargas Llosa, Morgana (daughter of Mario Vargas Llosa), 44, 171, 214 Vargas Maldonado, Ernesto, 1 Vecellio, Tiziano, 75 Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 71, 105 Verne, Jules, 58 viaje a la ficción, El, 134, 209, 214–215 “Visita a Karl Marx,” viii, 3, 33, 44, 213 Von Hayek, Frederic, 55, 193; The Road to Serfdom, 55, 193 Von Humboldt, Alexander, 138–139, 218; Cosmos, 138–139; Personal Narrative,

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138, 218; Viaje a las regiones equinocciales del Nuevo Continente, 138–139 Washington State University, x, 36–37, 199, 201–202, 213 Williams, Raymond, 150; The Politics of Modernism, 151 Woolf, Virginia, 76 Yáñez, Agustín, 151 Yeats, W. B. 113 Zalamea, Jorge, 35

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