Latin American Literature

Some years ago, literary critics writing about Latin American literature referred to a 'boom' that had taken place; it still continues. We in Sri Lanka are familiar with the work of a number of distinguished Latin American writers. The novels of Garcia Marquez are frequently referred to in Sinhala critical writings by those who evince an interest in magical realism. Some of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda have been translated into Sinhala.

In today's column, I wish to focus on an important Peruvian writer who has garnered many international accolades and has been a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize. He is Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian novelist, playwright, essayist, academic and a politician. In 1990 he ran for the presidency unsuccessfully. He, along with novelists such as Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes, represent the pulse of dynamism of Latin American literature.

Vargas Llosa started off as a left-leaning writer with a deep interest in socialism. His early works reflect a social vision inflected by socialist thinking. However, over the years, he seems to have moved away from that position to a neo-liberal stance and now even endorses conservative agendas. Vargas Llosa once remarked that, "literature in general and the novel in particular are expressions of discontent. Their social usefulness lies principally in the fact that they remind people that the world is always wrong, that life should always change." He appears to be looking for a paradise of truth: however, as Marcel Proust once observed, a paradise is always a lost paradise.

Vargas Llosa established his reputation as a writer by aligning himself with those who sought to expose the corrosive impact of capitalism in Latin America, and the unacceptable social injustices it promoted. Later, for a variety of reasons, he broke with the Latin American left, and his literary works increasingly began to underline the perils of dogmatism, fanaticism and utopian dreams. What is evident, both in his socialist phase and neo-liberalist phase, is Vargas Llosa's conviction that these deficiencies could be eliminated through resolute political actions.

Injustice for him was to use Homer's phrase, "fugitive from the camp of victors." However, in recent times, this optimism seems to have evaporated. He once observed, "the politics that is lived and practised day by day, has little to do with ideas, values and imagination, with long-range visions, with notions of an ideal society, with generosity, solidarity or idealism" Vargas Llosa's works can be divided into two time frames modernist" and "postmodernist" periods. His early novels such as "The Time of the Hero", "The Green House" and "Conversation in the Cathedral", display high modernist characteristics. His second novel, "The Green House", in my judgment, is one of his most accomplished works. This novel, which bears the influence of William Faulkner, is unflinchingly political in its ambitions and launches a fierce indictment of traditional institutions of power such as the military and the church. It also focuses on the victimization of women. Vargas Llosa was deeply interested in experimentations with narrative forms, "The Green House" bears testimony to this fact; experimentation for him was as instinctive as breath.

Later he moved to a more postmodernist style of fiction-writing. Novels such as "Captain Pantoja and the Special Service" and "Aunt Julia" and the Scriptwriter (both of which were made into films), "The Storyteller", exemplify this trend. His two novels, "The Green House" (modernist) and "Captain Pantoja and the Special Service" (postmodernist) merit comparison. Both of them deal with prostitution, the workings of the military and the church as well as complex narrative structures. However, the former is a serious modernist work while the latter is a comic and playful postmodernist novel.

"Aunt Julia and the Script writer" is another of Vargas Llosa's postmodernist novel. This is a novel that I frequently teach in my classes on postmodernism, and students like the comedy, narrative adventurousness, playful teasing and the deft use of pop culture that mark the novel.

This novel has its theme the irrepressible human desire to create illusory worlds. There are two intersecting narrative discourses in this novel; the first is the personal story of love of the protagonist, the second Pedro Camacho's radio soap operas.

The odd-numbered chapters narrate the story of the protagonist over a twelve month period in which he experiences failure to write serious literature. This is contrasted with the second narrative that deals with the work of the highly successful soap opera writer.

The even-numbered chapters constitute narrations based on Camacho's radio plays. This contrast raises interesting issues related to consumerism, self-identity and literary textuality. "The War of the End of the World" is another important work of fiction by Vargas Llosa.

This 568-page novel is epic in its scope and recounts the fascinating story of an anti-government uprising by a group of religious fanatics in rural Brazil in the nineteenth century; it is reminiscent of Tolstoy's work that Vargas Llosa admires so much. It is as much about contemporary Peru as it is about 19 century Brazil.

Once again the author's experiments with strategies of narrative, his juxtaposition of public action and private reflection, vast expanses and enclosed spaces, are cogent and self-assured. The intractability of history in yielding its meaning is evident in Vargas Llosa as it is in Tolstoy. Many would regard this as a modernist novel; my own feeling, though, is that at a deeper level of artistic apprehension, it contains certain postmodernist elements.

I have chosen to focus on Latin American literature today in order to enforce what I think is a larger point. During the past few years, there has been an acrimonious debate among Sinhala writers and critics about the relevance of postmodernism.

This debate, which turned ugly at times, was largely ill-informed and misdirected. If we are to understand the true meaning of postmodernism, we need to move outside American and European enclaves.

Latin American writers have been composing postmodernist novels from the periphery; like us, they have been subject to imperialism and colonialism and Euro-American hegemonies. We share certain interests in common with these Latin American writers, and hence their experimentations can prove to be instructive.