Abstract
Without a doubt, Vargas Llosa’s prolific literary production has run a very different course than José María Arguedas’s. The themes that seem to concern him most persistently, linked in a more or less oblique way to the problem of truth (which in Arguedas’s work takes on dramatic overtones), refer to the opposite of this latter concept in Vargas Llosa’s narrative and essayistic production.
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Notes
- 1.
The Peruvian generation of the 1950s, of which Vargas Llosa was a member, generally also included authors like Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Francisco Bendezú, Carlos Eduardo Zavaleta, Luis Loayza, Alejandro Romualdo, Pablo Guevara, Eleodoro Vargas Vicuña, Javier Sologuren, Jorge Eduardo Eielson y Blanca Varela, among others. On this generation, see Miguel Gutiérrez’s controversial book, La generación del 50: un mundo dividido, in which he studies intellectuals born in Peru between 1921 and 1936, including figures like Abimael Guzmán.
- 2.
The notion of “world literature,” long-established in the European context, was coined, significantly, as a geocultural reference to the space in which literary texts and authors receive transnational recognition and attention. This concept, which has been debated in the academic world for its undeniable ideologico-cultural connotations, constitutes another form of referring to the topic of the recognition, promotion, and consumption of a literary product in the global market of symbolic goods that capitalism consolidates and redefines in the second half of the twentieth century. On the concept of world literature, see Casanova and Moretti. For a critical perspective on this topic, see the texts in Sánchez Prado’s book.
- 3.
The perceived mediocrity of the Peruvian cultural milieu continued to torment Vargas Llosa even after he had achieved widespread recognition. He writes, for example, in La utopía arcaica, published in 1996: “Inequality, discrimination, backwardness, the concentration of wealth in the hands of an infinitesimal minority surrounded by an ocean of misery affect not only workers, peasants, and the unemployed. They are also obstacles to the practice of intellectual or artistic activity. In what kind of conditions can a writer survive in societies where half the population is illiterate? How can literature flourish in countries with no publishing houses or literary journals, where, in order to not just up and die, authors often must cover the publishing costs of their own books? What kind of literary life can be mustered in societies where material conditions—lack of education, miserable salaries, chronic unemployment—have established a veritable cultural apartheid that segregates books from the vast majority? And if, on top of it all, the state has imposed systems of control on the press, television, radio, and universities, places where literature might find refuge and support, how could any writer remain blind and deaf to social problems?” (26).
- 4.
On Vargas Llosa’s ideological profile and his contradictory political positions, see Juan E. de Castro, “Mr. Vargas Llosa goes to Washington.”
- 5.
Following Larsen’s critique, Vargas Llosa interprets the project of modernity from this position of ideological inanity that converts reality and political thought into simulacra—a tendency that makes him “the Pantaleón Pantoja of neoliberalism” (147)—thus turning it into a modernity that, according to Larsen, seems to reveal itself more easily to those who, although they have the ability to represent it aesthetically, are poorly equipped to understand it theoretically (168).
- 6.
Thus, Vargas Llosa admits: “These are individualistic values by definition, resistant to any purely social conception of man, in which Camus saw two forms of redemption for the species, a way of regenerating society and a superior and privileged type of human relationship” (“Albert Camus y la moral de los límites,” in Contra viento y marea I 237/“Albert Camus and the Morality of Limits,” in Making Waves: Essays 111).
- 7.
Vargas Llosa dedicated a series of articles to Sartre’s work. One may consult, for example, in Contra viento y marea, I, in addition to “El mandarín,” “Los otros contra Sartre,” “Sartre y el Nobel,” “Sartre y el marxismo,” and “Sartre veinte años después.” On Sartre and Camus’ relationship and the polemics between the two, see, in the same volume, “Revisión de Albert Camus” and “Albert Camus y la moral de los límites.” In this latter article, originally published in Plural in 1975, Vargas Llosa appeals to Camus’ moral questioning of every ideology and the author’s obsession with State terrorism and the sacrifice of liberty in order to make his shift to a neoliberal position, leaving behind both Sartre’s thought and the socialism that had previously seduced him, focusing on the real root of all of his intellectual and political preoccupations: “the relationship between the creator and the principles that govern societies,” which is to say, the relationship between power, the role of the intellectual, and the relative autonomy of the cultural sphere (“Albert Camus y la moral de los límites,” in Contra viento y marea I 231-52/“Albert Camus and the Morality of Limits” in Making Waves: Essays 107–16). Rowe has pointed out “the impoverishment of political discourse” in this essay on Camus, a quality that will impact all of Vargas Llosa’s political discourse in subsequent years (“Vargas Llosa y el lugar de enunciación autoritario” 68).
- 8.
[This term refers to the large shanty towns—literally “young towns”—that have developed around Lima and other cities in Peru as a result of massive migration (largely of black, indigenous, and mestizo peasants) from the countryside since the 1940s.—Tr.]
- 9.
On this topic see Cornejo Polar, Rama (Writing Across Cultures), and Losada.
- 10.
The debate includes articles entitled “Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura: algunos malentendidos a liquidar,” by Cortázar; “Contrarrespuesta para armar,” Collazos’ January 1970 response to the Argentine writer; and Vargas Llosa’s reply, “Luzbel, Europa y otras conspiraciones,” which dates from April 1970.
- 11.
The article by Vargas Llosa that provoked Collazos to respond was “La cultura en México,” published in Siempre! on 16 April 1969.
- 12.
To confirm the use of the idea of “creative demons” among writers of the Boom era, including the concepts that they continued to support up to the present, see Collazos’ response to José Carvajal, in which the Colombian writer addresses ideas about creative demons, the disconformity of the writer, and literature as an escape from reality:
-
JC: Do you still believe that “literary creation is a kind of exorcism of our inner demons”?
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OC: If this were not the case, the writer would constantly be exposed to madness. Literary creation is his “escape route,” as Graham Greene confirms in his autobiography.
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JC: Does that mean that the writer’s inner demons have always been exile, eroticism, and politics?
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OC: In a certain sense, yes: those are the dominant themes in my narrative. And they respond to a nomadic experience, assumed from a very young age. A dangerous experience: I never pushed it away, I assumed it. Exile as an autobiographical experience, eroticism as an expression of character, the pleasure principle that has ruled my life; politics, in the broadest sense, as an ethical response to a world or a social order I despise (Carvajal, “Oscar Collazos: la inconformidad irremediable”).
-
- 13.
On the theme of demons in Vargas Llosa, see Raymond Williams, particularly Chap. 2, in which he summarizes Vargas Llosa’s ideas and connects them to Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Nietzsche’s irrationalism, etc.
- 14.
It remains obvious that, in its pure revolutionary intentionality, this idea overlooked, for example, Vallejo’s thematic and linguistic complexity, a feature that inevitably distanced him from any direct relationship with the popular subject with whom he ideologically identified.
- 15.
The texts that make up the polemic which took place in the pages of Marcha are, in order of publication: (1) Ángel Rama: “Vade Retro” (no. 1591); (2) Mario Vargas Llosa: “El regreso de Satán” (no. 1602); (3) Rama: “El fin de los demonios” (no. 1603); (4) Vargas Llosa: “Resurrección de Belcebú o la disidencia creadora” (no 1609); (5) Rama: “Nuevo escritor para nueva sociedad” (no. 1610); and (6) Rama: “Un arma llamada novela” (no. 1612). The articles that correspond to Vargas Llosa’s interventions have been reproduced in Contra viento y marea. All the interventions also appear in the book co-edited by Rama and Vargas Llosa, García Márquez y la problemática de la novela.
- 16.
Vargas Llosa’s book on García Márquez, never republished owing to the enmity that later emerged between the two writers, originally constituted Vargas Llosa’s doctoral thesis at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he obtained the title of Bachelor of Literature in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, Romantic Philology department. The academic courses he took for the degree were completed between 1958 and 1960. His doctoral thesis was directed by Alonso Zamora Vicente.
- 17.
On the polemic between Rama and Vargas Llosa, consult Sánchez Lopez, Mariaca, L. Castañeda, and Perilli.
- 18.
Goethe has been cited as one of the forerunners of the idea of the demons of creation, as has Georges Bataille, both establishing in different contexts the notion of evil and satanic disorder as one of the driving forces behind understanding creation as both rebellion against the established order and the uncovering of occult, prohibited aspects of reality. For example, see Kristal, Temptation of the Word (3–5). In the national context of Peru, the influence of César Moro—from whom Vargas Llosa takes a text as an epigraph for El elogio de la madrastra—has also been established. Vargas Llosa says of Moro: “The extreme case of the exiled Peruvian creator is certainly that of the poet César Moro. Very few have so completely and desperately felt the demon of creation, very few have served solitude with such passion and sacrifice” (Contra viento y marea I 98). The idea of an association between the satanic or demonic and the creative process has a metaphoric value that criticism has at times exaggerated. In general, it is a figurative way of discussing the transgressive or subversive impulse that literature can yield. In Vargas Llosa it is a commonplace appropriated from different contexts, repeated in order to reaffirm the “rebel” and exceptional quality of the writer as well as the experience of his literature. With Moro (who was, together with Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, one of the most interesting representatives of surrealism in Latin America) Vargas Llosa shares the idea of literature as a domain separate from the real, completely autonomous, defined by arbitrariness, and which does not admit of any specific agenda or program linked to social poetry, indigenist art, etc. Pragmatics and poetics are thus separate domains of action and thought. On Moro’s influence on Vargas Llosa, see Castro-Klarén, Mario Vargas Llosa 95–96, and Kristal, Temptation of the Word 12–19.
- 19.
Regarding the essays that make up Writing Across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America, originally published in Spanish in 1982: “The Andean Cultural Area” first saw the light of day in 1974; “The Saga of the Mestizo” was published in 1975 as the prologue to Fundación de una cultura nacional indoamericana, in which were gathered disparate and unpublished works by Arguedas; and “Mythic Intelligence” was published in 1976 as an introduction to the collection of essays Arguedas published as Señores e indios. All this critical material is evidence of Rama’s tastes and preferences, which have already been analyzed in previous chapters of the present study.
- 20.
Rama and Vargas Llosa worked together at the Casa de las Américas and were also aligned (with Rama being more moderate) on certain critiques of Castro’s cultural policies. In spite of the passionate and rigorous tone of the polemic, Rama always recognizes the merits of Vargas Llosa’s narrative work. A good example is his admiring review of La guerra del fin del mundo, published in 1982. Vargas Llosa also recognized Rama’s contributions in “Ángel Rama: la pasión y la crítica,” a note he wrote as a biographical sketch on the occasion of Rama’s death in 1983.
- 21.
According to Franco, in García Márquez: historia de un deicidio the conception Vargas Llosa presents of the artist as Lucifer rebelling against society to create his own reality is another version of the writer-hero (Jean Franco, “From Modernization to Resistance,” in Critical Passions 295).
- 22.
All of Rama’s work can be read as the most significant Latin American attempt to clarify the process of cultural institutionalization in the region as well as to contribute to it, demonstrating the tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes of the intellectual field in general and the literary field in particular. As I have shown elsewhere, the theory of transculturation is situated at the crossroads established in the 1970s between national culture and foreign ideological influences, not only liberal modernizing influences but also Marxist influences, whose “foreign” character constituted one of the bases for Right-wing repression of Leftist theory and praxis. Rama attempts to reflect on these convergences which necessarily and productively sustain postcolonial cultures in Latin America and combine with vernacular currents which cannibalize, that is, incorporate their contents, reformulate, and convert them into a constitutive part of ideology and social practice. A book like The Lettered City, designed to offer a cartography of the processes of cultural institutionalization that at one time demonstrated the relative autonomy of the cultural field and of the multiple systems that tensely coexist within it, must not be seen in any other way. In this regard, see Moraña, “Ideología de la Transculturación” and other essays on these themes included in Ángel Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos, as well as Poblete, “Trayectoria crítica de Ángel Rama.” For a critique of The Lettered City, see Perus.
- 23.
With regard to this subject, one may consult Van Delden’s (in my opinion, oversimplified) opinions on the almost always Manichean dualisms that affect Vargas Llosa’s thought. Mentioned in his text are oppositions which include fiction/reality, private/public, literature/politics, conformity/transgression, democracy/dictatorship, which become more fluid, Van Delden recognizes, in a fictional world (214). Also, according to Van Delden, Vargas Llosa’s anti-utopian vision of society as a whole nonetheless admits of the possibility of individual or symbolic utopias. Although Van Delden understands that “[Vargas Llosa’s] itinerary is rich in situations and in intellectual dilemmas” (196), his study never explores the ideological baggage or the aesthetic connections that these intersections establish for the Peruvian author on the level of politics and art.
- 24.
Oviedo has highlighted the similarities between both spaces and the fact that these institutions constitute closed, marginal, and hierarchical nuclei around which the characters circulate, adopting or retaking new names (La Selvática, Lituma) according to the settings and roles they happen to be portraying in each case (“Historia de un libertino,” Dossier Vargas Llosa 33–48).
- 25.
“The system of images in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels illustrates a central intuition of evil and distortion. This intuition responds to itself in the critical commentary on his novels, in their systematic denunciation. But even in criticism Vargas Llosa’s work preserves its drama and its irresolute condition. This drama makes existence show itself in its intolerable modality, in its perverse and poorly configured spectacle. This condition, which reveals existence to be incomplete and even imperfectible, annihilating itself in its lack of a genuine rule, making destruction its ultimate horizon” (Ortega, ibid., 177).
- 26.
For more on this topic, see Cano Gaviria.
- 27.
Several critics sort and classify Vargas Llosa’s work according to diverse criteria beyond the period in which they were written. Thus, for example, O’Bryan-Knight studies La tía Julia y el escribidor, La historia de Mayta, and El hablador as a trilogy, in spite of the fact that the works are not contiguous and the author has never indicated that they belong to the same novelistic cycle. For O’Bryan-Knight, the three works become stronger together as they focus on, respectively, different spaces or phases of Peru: the Capital and the coastal region, the mountains, and the jungle, although this distribution of Vargas Llosa’s work is hardly radical since, for example, La historia de Mayta develops partly in the Lurigancho prison in Lima, and other novels, like some sections of La casa verde and Pantaleón y las visitadoras, also venture into the space of the Amazon jungle.
- 28.
In “¿Quién mató a Mario Vargas Llosa?” Ortega calls attention to the behaviorist nature of narratives that develop characters as products of social circumstances and that put more importance on the plot than on the treatment of intimacy.
- 29.
O’Bryan-Knight notes, along with other critics, the metafictional character of La historia de Mayta and the consequent objectivization of the ideological (68–71). See also Dunkerley.
- 30.
In one of his books, John King cites Anthony Burgess’s review of The War of the End of the World. This opinion is illustrative of the way in which Latin American literature is still perceived in certain international media, in spite of the efforts of many award-winning authors from the region. Burgess notes: “There is a danger that the Great Contemporary Latin American novel will soon be laying down (if it has not done so already) rigid rules in respect of its content, length and style. Apparently it has to be bulky, baroque, full of freaks and cripples with names hard to fix in one’s mind, crammed with wrongs done to peasants by the state or the land owners, seasoned with grotesque atrocities, given to apocalyptic visions, ending up with resignation at the impossibility of anything ever going right for South America” (“Latin Freakshow,” Observer, 19 May 1985, qtd. in King, On Modern Latin American Fiction ix).
- 31.
On this theme, see Sergio R. Franco, “Tecnologías de la representación.”
- 32.
Enrique Mayer has referred to the belief in pishtacos as an element that on a popular level thematizes the fear caused by violence and the oppression of indigenous culture and which serves to localize, in an irrational zone of the collective imaginary, collective feelings of terror, hatred, vengeance, etc. It is interesting to note following Mayer’s suggestions that the figure of the pishtaco also serves as a vehicle for a critique of capitalism understood as social vampirism, especially regarding the most dispossessed segments of society. Supposedly, the fat that the pishtacos extract from the bodies of Indians serves as a lubricant for industrial machinery or is utilized as a way to pay Peru’s foreign debt. Here, belief articulates economic aspects signaling the biopolitical implications of capitalist exploitation. See Mayer, “Peru in Deep Trouble” 472–73.
- 33.
Of course, this periodization is not definitive, and it is only partially complete since some works from one period present the characteristics of works from others. In any case, the stages Kristal recognizes provide one idea of how to organize Vargas Llosa’s writing according to the changes in his political thought. In this regard, see Kristal’s “Introduction” to The Cambridge Companion to Vargas Llosa as well as “From Utopia to Reconciliation” and Temptation of the Word.
- 34.
Casement was accused of having sympathized with the so-called Easter Rising, which took place in Dublin 23–30 April 1916 with the objective of liberating the Irish people from the domination of the UK. However, Casement seems to have been convinced that these actions were going to fail and had returned to Ireland to persuade the insurgents that the situation would not turn out well. The uprising, stifled six days after it began, was led by James Connolly, chief of the Irish Citizen Army, who was also executed.
- 35.
For a detailed account of Casement’s life, see Reid and Mitchell.
- 36.
“The primary obligation of a novel is to become independent of the real world, to impose on the reader an autonomous reality, valid in and of itself, capable of persuading the reader of its truth through its internal coherence and its intimate verisimilitude rather than through its subordination to the real world. What authorizes a fiction’s sovereignty, what emancipates it from worldly affairs, from ‘history,’ is the additional element, that sum of thematic and formal ingredients that the author did not take from reality, that he did not steal from his own life or the lives of his contemporaries, that was born from his intuition, his madness, his dreams, and which his intelligence and skill blended together with everything else that every novelist takes from experience, whether his own of that of others” (Vargas Llosa, Carta de batalla por Tirant lo Blanc 102, emphasis in the original).
- 37.
M. Keith Booker has seen in these features reason to categorize Vargas Llosa as a postmodernist writer, particularly because of his parodic treatment of social conflict and political history.
- 38.
See Sergio R. Franco, “The Recovered Childhood,” as well as Kelly Austin, and Larsen.
- 39.
[In English in the original.—Tr.]
- 40.
See Herlinghaus, “La imaginación melodramática,” in Narraciones anacrónicas 21–59.
- 41.
Ortega argues that Vargas Llosa is not interested in “popular exoticism” or in the hybrid forms of popular culture, but rather in the possibilities that those spaces can offer for parodying society’s rules and exploring the grotesque in a world in which moral norms and principals are in crisis. This is the Peruvian author’s “perverse derivation.”
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Moraña, M. (2016). Which Truth? Otherness and Melodrama in Vargas Llosa. In: Arguedas / Vargas Llosa. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57187-8_8
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