A Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa by Sabine Köllmann

Author:Sabine Köllmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hispanic Studies
ISBN: 9781782042495
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2014-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

7

Experimenting with Genres: Novels of the 1980s and After

In 1984 Vargas Llosa published Historia de Mayta,1 a novel whose title alludes to the ambiguous relationship between story and history that was a crucial theme in La guerra del fin del mundo. The English translation appeared under the title The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta,2 for lack of an equivalent of the dual meaning of the Spanish ‘historia’. Vargas Llosa put it on record that he was unhappy with the English title, and unhappy with the reception of his book as a political novel. Although he initially commented widely on the political meaning of the novel in his interviews following the publication of Historia de Mayta, he later insisted that its primary concern was the metafictional aspect of a writer-protagonist seen at work, converting history into fiction, stating that the work ‘stands as a metaphor for my vocation as a writer’.3 A considerable number of his critics, however, focused on the novel’s harsh representation of the Peruvian Left as illusionary, irresponsible and hypocritical, accusing Vargas Llosa of misrepresenting historical left-wing revolutionary movements and caricaturing recognizable contemporary leftist personalities.4 This critical reception was not least influenced by Vargas Llosa’s highly controversial political position in Peru after his role in the report on the murders of journalists in Uchuraccay in 1983 (see chapter 3), a year before Historia de Mayta appeared. The fact that political violence, past and present, plays a pivotal role in this novel makes it difficult to see it solely as an exercise in metafiction.

Historia de Mayta is the account of a novelist wanting to tell the story of a failed revolutionary coup, based on a historical incident which took place in Jauja, a town in the Peruvian Andes. In the novel, the rebellion is organized by the Trotskyite Mayta, a former school friend of the writer-protagonist, and the young enthusiast Vallejos, a member of the armed forces. Naively conceived and badly executed, the coup failed because it gained very little support. The writer-protagonist and first-person narrator has the clear connotation ‘Mario Vargas Llosa’, identifiable by his status as a well-known and successful contemporary author, by his residence in Barranco, his habits (the early morning run) and his political and literary concerns. His motivations for wanting to write about Mayta’s story establish a clear link to the real-life author Vargas Llosa and his preferred ingredients of an intriguing story (the often quoted key words from La orgía perpetua [The Perpetual Orgy]5 are all there, in this quotation from the novel): ‘es posible que … el elemento oscuramente sugestivo en ella, para mí, sean los ingredientes de truculencia, marginalidad, rebeldía, delirio, exceso, que confluyen en aquel episodio’ (Historia de Mayta, p. 53) [it’s also possible that … the obscurely suggestive element I see in it consists of the truculence, marginality, rebelliousness, delirium, and excess which all came together in that episode] (The Real Life, p. 44). From the beginning, Historia de Mayta creates the illusion that the novel we are reading

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