Abstract
One should perhaps begin by recognizing that Vargas Llosa’s achievements at the level of narrative technique, literary structure, and composition of fictitious worlds represent one of the pinnacles of Spanish-language literature, as well as some of the most brilliant examples of literary production in Latin America.
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Notes
- 1.
As Cornejo Polar asserts, “It is clear that the productive system that sustains Vargas Llosa’s narrative work is significantly more developed and effective than the Peruvian system; thus, his representative status in this specific situation is partial and indirect. Although he hews to a modernizing dynamic that is common to a more or less broad group of Peruvian authors, Vargas Llosa, escaping national constraints, reaches unthinkable heights within his own country” (“Hipótesis” 253).
- 2.
Arguedas’s narrative thus constitutes “the most intense and illuminating aesthetic reproduction of the fundamental contradictions of Peruvian historical development: in essence, from its dismembered socio-cultural constitution, in which various cultural systems converge with their respective languages and distinct modes of production, weakly integrated into a slow and traumatic process of capitalist homogenization that finally arrives with a noticeable delay” (Cornejo Polar, “Hipótesis” 251–52).
- 3.
Certain approaches Vargas Llosa took regarding the problem of how to deal with indigenous language include, for example, the strategy of hybridization (in El hablador) or that of “mistura”—strategies similar to those Arguedas himself utilized more effectively in many of his own texts.
- 4.
On the topic of Vargas Llosa’s “liberalism,” see Escárzaga-Nicté, in addition to Lauer’s and Degregori’s fundamental works.
- 5.
I am grateful to Sergio R. Franco for this opportune reference which confirms the interpretation I offer in this study of the utilitarian and often gratuitous form in which Vargas Llosa makes use of language, in its prosaic rather than in its poetic function.
- 6.
Cornejo Polar asserts that, already with Panteleón y las visitadoras (1973) [Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1978)] and later with La tía Julia y el escribidor, Vargas Llosa inaugurated the novel of entertainment in Peru. This, in addition to his tendency toward irony and parody, is another aspect through which melodrama repeatedly appears and is channeled in Vargas Llosa’s texts.
- 7.
Rancière explains: “I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. Aristotle states that a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed. However, another form of distribution precedes this act of partaking in government: the distribution that determines those who have a part in the community of citizens. A speaking being, according to Aristotle, is a political being. If a slave understands the language of its rulers, however, he does not ‘possess’ it. Plato states that artisans cannot be put in charge of the shared or common elements of the community because they do not have the time to devote themselves to anything other than their work. They cannot be somewhere else because work will not wait. The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed” (The Politics of Aesthetics 12, emphasis in original).
- 8.
For a study of Vargas Llosa’s critical essays, see, among others, King.
- 9.
Vargas Llosa’s essayistic and critical work is compiled in various volumes. For a representative example see La verdad de las mentiras. For more on this aspect of Vargas Llosa’s work, see King.
- 10.
On this text, see Franco, “The Recovered Childhood.”
- 11.
Sarlo analyzes the role of the simulacrum as a symbolic modality and the function of electronic aesthetics in Vargas Llosa’s and Fujimori’s presidential campaigns.
- 12.
Jorge Volpi offers an interesting commentary on this text by Vargas Llosa in his review: “In La civilización del espectáculo Vargas Llosa is correct to diagnose the end of an era: the era of intellectuals like himself. Little by little, our ideas about authority and intellectual property become hazy; borders between high culture and popular culture no longer exist; and yes, the world of printed books is fading away. However, instead of seeing in this change a triumph of barbarism, one could understand it as the opportunity to define new relations of cultural power. The solution facing the empire of banality that he so meticulously describes will not emerge through a return to a previous model of authority but through the recognition of a freedom that, as vertiginous, ungraspable, and shifting though it may be, is derived from the same freedom for which Vargas Llosa has always fought.”
- 13.
Bhabha has referred to the necessity of articulating new forms of humanistic labor that correctly indicate that disciplinary liminality is a space in which the humanities can survive. Arguedas illustrates this idea, namely, that the Western world lives in the present within the limits of its own disciplines, while Vargas Llosa’s world continues to be a compartmentalized universe where fusions and exchanges can only belong to the space of fiction, and otherness constitutes at most a disturbance of the dominant identities from which considerable aesthetic dividends can be extracted, insofar as they illustrate a social drama that productively intersects with the thematic necessities of literature. For more on this topic, see Mitchell, “Translator Translated.”
- 14.
On Arguedas’s relation to the object of technology, see Beasley-Murray.
- 15.
Rama has detected in Arguedas’s 1968 speech a manifestation of the writer’s complete social consciousness which recognizes and fully accepts his historico-cultural mission. He understands Arguedas’s words as a confirmation of the category that Rama himself appropriated from Fernando Ortiz and from the Venezuelan critic and writer Mariano Picón Salas. Promoting a slightly self-serving [in English in the original—Tr.] interpretation of Arguedas’s words, Rama says: “He was quite familiar with the mestizo character of Peruvian culture, and he also knew his own role as an agent of transculturation, so the whole problem consisted in finding forms that the ongoing transculturating process of becoming mestizo could adopt that would not destroy the roots of rural communities or provoke anomie in them but that would also not dry up their creative sources and prevent their full incorporation into history” (Writing Across Cultures 185).
- 16.
With regard to Arguedas’s work on music, artisanal artifacts, and collecting chants and songs, see Huamán 145–91, as well as Rowe’s articles in Ensayos Arguedianos.
- 17.
See, for example, as Lienhard suggests, Arguedas’s “La sierra en el proceso de la cultura peruana,” included in Formación de una cultura nacional indoamericana 9–27. In general, this entire volume, the texts for which were selected by Ángel Rama, constitutes a very representative demonstration of the themes discussed in this section of the present book.
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Moraña, M. (2016). Language as a Battlefield (II): The Narcissism of the Voice. In: Arguedas / Vargas Llosa. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57187-8_6
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