The Formal Analogue to Peruvian Despair in Vargas Llosas - Essay Example

The Formal Analogue to Peruvian Despair in Vargas Llosa’s In his book entitled Allegory: Theory of a Mode, Fletcher divulges that: A systematically complicated character will generate a large number of other protagonists who react against or with him in a syllogistic manner. I say Agenerate,@ because the heroes[...] seem to create the worlds around them. They are like those people in real life who Aproject,@ ascribing fictitious personalities to those whom they meet and live with. By analysing these projections, we determine what is going on in the mind of the highly imaginative projector (1964, p. 35-36). This question of ‘projection’ is essential to an analytical understanding of Mario Vargas Llosa’s conception of the total novel, which in the case of his masterpiece Conversación en la catedral intended to accurately render the state of Peru under the 1948-1956 Odría dictatorship. The challenge of this task is explained by Vargas himself: Resulta espantosamente difícil escribir sobre la realidad latinoamericana, justificarla literariamente, hacerla verosímil; es una realidad demagógica, irreal. Hay que buscar formulas sumamente complejas, barrocas, para trasladar a una narración sin caer en el panfleto. The difficulties of creating this literary ‘verosimilitud’, this intimate and convincing connection between object and representation, forced Vargas to make numerous structural and formal innovations in order to arrive at this accurate projection of the nation of Perú. In doing so, he approached the concept of allegory in reverse, finding it necessary for him to distill the scattered and discordant energy of Peruvian history into a projected character, a projected mind, a projected form frenetically developed in order to become ‘an anatomy of an ignorant society exactly evades such interlocked complexities’ as are presented in the novel (The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture 2004, p. 98). In order to represent analogically the contemporary state of Perú through the voice of Conversación’s ‘hero’ Santiago Zavala, Vargas Llosa was compelled to seek its formal analogue as a sufficient and central projection of the Peruvian reality. Thus, the form of the narrative itself managed to become the true likeness of Perú, the same hall of shattered mirrors as the senseless history of the nation it intends to depict. In developing this true likeness, the structure arrives at a relentless shattering of all sense of linearity or causal justice, formally kaleidoscopic in its funereal procession through the broken devastation of Odría-era Perú. Essentially, in examining the formal structure of the novel, its analogue, the projected ‘realidad latinoamericana,’ is disclosed. The question looms over the text: ‘¿En qué momento se había jodido el Perú?’ (Vargas Llosa 1969, p. 13). Structurally the question comes at the beginning in a long series of questions, in the second sentence, after the brief shot of squalor and dilapidation filtered through the loveless lens of Santiago’s mind. In exploring the effects of the ochenio in Perú, the question unfolds through a series of confusions and obfuscations that ultimately amount to temporal trauma. If history is a logical sequence of events, then it can - at least a priori - be understood linearly, start to finish or else backwards. Yet this is not the case structurally in the novel. Nor it is the case in the fragmented minds of the main character, whose dissembled narrative spills out into a projection of his own helpless bewilderment. The voice of the narrative, which describes events consistently in the past tense, remains in the present specifically to record the thoughts of the ´hero’: ¿Era que se había roto algo que parecía eterno, piensa1, me dolió tanto por ella, por mí, por él? Pero habías disimulado, como siempre, Zavalita, más que siempre...[A]hora y por primera vez que estaban juntos y no estaban, que faltaba la comunicación respiratoria de otras veces, la inteligencia corpóral de otras veces... que horriblemente aquí y ahora también algo artificioso y mentiroso los aislaba, como las conversaciones con el viejo piensa... (Vargas Llosa 1969, p. 173). Structurally Santiago’s expression of loss, derived from his youthful affection for Aída, comes painfully, jarringly through the present moment, a moment which as it progresses carries all the fragments of his life with it, along with his failures and frustrations whose structural counterpart precisely mirrors the deep fragmentation of their residence in his mind. This sense of frustration, of interspliced and incongruous dialogue, of frustrated mental processing of the historical realities of Latin America, is encapsulated in a reprisal of the questioning by the author himself when he states: [E]n qué momento se jodió México, en qué momento se jodió Colombia, en qué momento se jodió América Latina... Es una pregunta que no podemos esquivar cuando miramos alrededor y vemos qué son nuestros países y lo que hubieran podido ser, pues la pregunta viene de forma irresistible: en qué momento nos jodimos, qué pasó en nuestro pasado para que de pronto empezáramos a declinar, para que perdiéramos una y otra vez las oportunidades que otros países aprovechaban (Camin 2000, p. 46). Yet in the formal expression of the book these questions cannot be resolved, or even heard, directly. Instead, the ‘conversation in the cathedral’ is lost among the wreckage of unnumbered past events and machinations. A question of fertility in the present, for example, is essentially and efficiently suffocated by former conversations of Marxist idealism which gives the illusion of hope and progress for Latin America while simultaneously thrusting it further into stagnation and instability (Vargas Llosa 1969, p. 193). The dialogue of the true present – recorded in Vargas Llosa’s election of present-tense verbs spersed throughout the novel, is made into a paralytic plea, a botched meandering of fruitless words, crushed beneath the debilitating incrustations of the past which so aptly represents Perú. Majluf describes in his thesis on the novel that the story ‘[se] permite ser leída como una alegoría nacional’ (2003, p. 142). However, it is not through the story, but specifically from within the pure form of its structure – that careful unfolding of a nonlinear kaleidoscoped ‘narrative’ - that this national allegory emerges. The fragmented temporal model of historical autojodimiento is rooted in the novel’s cynical treatment of ideologies in Peruvian culture. Santiago’s gradual and inevitable transformation into ‘Zavalita’ pivots precisely when he begins to involve himself in the ideological framework of Marxist thought. That Marxist thought would locate him in the realm of the oppressor, the petit-bourgeouisie whose benefits he is never convinced enough to renounce: Piensa: eras, eres, serás, morirás un pequeño burgués. ¿Las mamaderas, el colegio, la familia, el barrio fueron más fueres?, piensa. Ibas a misa, te confesabas y comulgabas los primeros viernes, rezabas y ya entonces mentira, no creo. I bas a la pensión de la sorda, los cambios cuantitativos al acumularse producían un cambio cualitativo, y tu sí sí, el más grande pensador materialista antes de Marx había sido Diderot, sí sí, y de repente el gusanito: mentira, no creo (Vargas Llosa 1969, p. 118-119). Through Santiago’s experience with the group, ultimately slinking out of prison with the help of his ‘bourgeouis’ father’s connections, Santiago evades any of the real personal sacrifice necessary to manifest the ideology (or his conviction of its truth). His evasion is an admission, one essential to Vargas Llosa’s view of the falsity, the narración caida en el panfleto, of all ideological foundations. As critic Gutiérrez Mouat (1993) explains, [f]or Vargas Llosa, ideologies are historical fantasies that take on the appearance of truth (and in addition promise a happy ending) by virtue of their internal consistency and, to that extent, operate in the manner of literary artifacts (p. 283). Representational justice cannot be attained through these mendacious literary artifacts, and the author ultimately decides to reject them in his historical interpretation, just as the protagonist ultimately decides to reject them as an adequate lens through which to perceive reality. Despite all of Santiago’s efforts – albeit halfhearted ones – to bring change to Latin America through Marxist ideology, he finds that the ideals serve not as vehicle for revolution, but solely as an inert system of coordinates, a useless apparatus as he faces the long hall of broken mirrors that is his historical reality, both national and personal. Just as Vargas Llosa was ultimately forced reject any sort of ideological crutch on which to propel the story, the author was forced necessarily to reject any sort of cohesive linear narrative. Linear time is a sort of ideology, one which presupposes the type of ‘internal consistency’ of causation totally lacking in the Peruvian reality. Instead Vargas Llosa presents reality as a series of quanta, or bundles, of disruption which take place in the narrator’s mind. The author describes in detail the effect toward which these quanta were intended: la ficción expresa una verdad distinta de la que contiene la realidad, aunque aún hoy cuando me enfrento al papel —al ordenador— me siento perplejo frente al proceso. En el caso de La Fiesta del Chivo me viene a la cabeza esa definición de Balzac que usé como epígrafe de otra novela, según la cual la novela ‘cuenta la historia privada de las naciones’. Algo de eso quise hacer en Conversación en La Catedral y ahora en mi nueva novela. Esta novela quiere explorar esa profunda degradación que supone, en la vida privada y familiar, en el conjunto del tejido social, una dictadura cuasi totalitaria como fue la de Trujillo entre 1930 y 1961, esa descomposición moral que afecta las relaciones humanas y también la psiquis de las personas, un veneno que sobrevive al régimen mismo, esas toxinas que siguen gangrenando el cuerpo social después de muerto el dictador (Vargas Llosa 2000, p. 28). In order to express these toxins persisting gangrened body of Perú’s society, the temporal-narrative technique of sporadic release of emotional and historical quanta was essential, as mediated by the personal mind of Santiago Zavala. The temporal break between the constant narration of Santiago’s thoughts in present tense with the remainder of events narrated in past structurally parallels the temporal break that occurred in Santiago’s mind – the dark chasm that splits and alienates the young ‘Santiago’ of the past from the grown and jaded ‘Zavalita’ of the present. This is seen embedded in grammar, with Santiago can process the reality of his own loss of innocence only through this separated consciousness distantly referred to as ‘you’: ¿Saldría mañana la noticia, se enteraría el viejo por los periódicos? Imaginabas la noche desvelada de la casa, Zavalita, el llanto de la mamá, el revoloteo y las carreras al teléfono y las visitas y los chismes de la Teté en el barrio y los comentarios del Chispas (Vargas Llosa 1969, p. 204). The quote reveals the numerous facets of the highly imaginative protagonist’s mind – thoughts of shame and its transferral into his community, thoughts of inner dialogue between the boy of hope and the man of despair, thoughts of the shameful disgrace that left scars on Santiago’s capacity to believe in any capacity for reform. He is a boy reprimanded, slapped on the wrist and told to go back to the ‘old way of things’, the status quo of drear that pervades life in Lima. This event is a significantly traumatic deflation of Santiago’s complex of illusions, and is mediated and grieved through the quanta of historical experience of these two separate identities, the one full of desire and hope for a good personal future, and the other full of active authority figures, drab and effectless prudence, and corrupt power structures that dominated Perú at the time. In doing this the narrative reconstructs Balzac’s ‘personal history of nations,’ by demonstrating the deep chasm that exists in Perú – between any naive and idealistic hope for progress or change and it is a the long and dense web of oppression, corruption and despair that weighs so heavily on Peruvian history. The entire novel takes place in Santiago’s long despairing present; yet it is a shattered present, a present moment jeweled and lacerated by the myriad shards of history. The novel records the result of these lacerations – the perpetual agony of a people crucified to a moment in history, inexorably torn and broken and tortured in the autojodimiento of opportunities, community development and clean power structures in the nation of Perú.. Critic Dalahl Majluf perceives in Conversación en la catedral ‘una alegoría desfundacional del Perú, en la que vemos una voz marcada por el pesimismo cuando se trata de hablar de la patria construida.’ ( 2003, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 42). Yet this ‘alegoría desfundacional’ exists not merely or even primarily in the voice of the narrator; its force and veracity, its ‘verosimilitud’ in allegorical representation are derived specifically from the energetic construct of its formal progression. The question posed at the beginning of the novel – ‘¿En qué momento se había jodido el Perú?’ (Vargas Llosa 1969, p. 13) – finds itself refracted endlessly through the node of the present moment in the mind of the protagonist, as registered on the several structural and linguistic levels controlled and developed by Vargas Llosa in his quest for the Total Novel, the complete expression of his personal history of Perú. With this, the structure of the novel itself becomes a projected allegory of the despairing Latin American condition; it becomes a shattered metanarrative of the Peruvian ethos, a jagged and kaleidoscopic mold in which the senseless tragedies of the ‘realidad latinoamericana’ must necessarily be bound. Works Cited Camin, Héctor Aguilar ‘“Nos mató la ideología”: Una entrevista con Mario Vargas Llosa’,  Nexos: Sociedad, Ciencia, Literatura, vol. 23, no. 271, pp. 42-51 [Online], Available at Expanded Academic ASAP database. Conte, Rafael 1972, Lenguaje y violencia: introducción a la nueva novela latinoamericana, Al-Borak, Madrid. Fletcher, Angus 1964, Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York. King, John (ed.) 2004, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge. Majluf, Dalahl 2003, ‘Lectura alegórica de 'Conversación en la catedral' de Mario Vargas Llosa’, Taller de Letras vol. 33. no. 1, pp. 42. Mouat, Ricardo G. 1993, ‘Vargas Llosa's Poetics of the Novel and Camus's Rebel’, World Literature Today, vol. 67, 1993 [Online], Available at Expanded Academic ASAP database. Vargas Llosa, Mario 2000, ‘Alvaro y Mario Vargas Llosa: Las dictaduras latinoamericanas’, Letras Libres vol. 2, no. 21, pp. 20-29. Vargas Llosa, Mario 1969, Conversación en la catedral, Editorial Seix Barral, Spain. Read More