Handout for Mario Vargas Llosa - La tía Julia y el escribidor

La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977)

Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru, 1936-)

Structure of lecture

· Introduction: (i) Vargas Llosa: biography and literary career; (ii) the ‘Boom’ in the Spanish American

novel; (iii) La tía Julia y el escribidor – how much can it be said to represent the ‘Boom’ novel?

(comparison with Cien años de soledad)

· Outline of plot/structure: (i) Two narrative threads – complex interweavings; (ii) ‘vasos comunicantes’.

· Analysis of novel: (i) Autobiography versus fiction;

(ii) Opposition between Literature and popular/mass culture

[Are these aesthetic categories maintained? Or does Vargas LLosa’s narrative technique of ‘vasos comunicantes’ confuse them?]

(iii) Incest as metaphor for novel’s thinking about art and literary creativity [No longer tragic

metaphor of Latin American history] ;

(iv) La tía Julia as Post-modernist text?

The ‘Boom’ in the Spanish American novel - some characteristics:[1]

All highly experimental: stream of consciousness, parallels narrative, temporal confusion, multiple voices, Joycean language games. Thrust towards monumentality in textual design.
All attempt totalizing re-writings of national/Latin American history (e.g. Cien años de soledad/ La casa verde / La muerte de Artemio Cruz).
All written in context of intense politicization. Literature as instrument of socio-political change. [See Q.3]
All use metaphors of incest, rape, violence as basis for their critiques of LAm’s social realities.
All preoccupied with complex philosophical issues and/or ‘big’ historical struggles –later accused of being ‘elitist’ and ‘patriarchal’ for these reasons.
For these reasons all seen as examples of ‘Modernism’ [do you agree?].

Quotations:

The Boom

1. [Hay] quienes sólo ven la mano de la CIA, o del Vaticano, o de Moscú, o Casa de las Américas, o de la Academia Sueca, o del British Council, detrás de cada premio, de cada nueva edición, de cada traducción. (Rodríguez Monegal, p. 14) [Literary success as result of broader material/economic/political context]

2. El boom (cualquiera que sea el juicio) no es sino el fenómeno exterior de un acontecimiento mucho más importante: la mayoría de edad de las letras latinoamericanas. (Rodríguez Monegal, p. 58) [Literary success as outcome of writer/generations’ ‘maturity] [Both ideas engaged with in La tía Julia]

Vargas Llosa on literature

3. El escritor ha sido, es y seguirá siendo un descontento. Nadie que esté satisfecho es capaz de escribir, nadie que esté de acuerdo, reconciliado con la realidad, cometería el ambicioso desatino de inventar realidades verbales. La vocación literaria nace del desacuerdo de un hombre con el mundo, de la intuición de deficiencias, vacíos y escorias a su alrededor. La literatura es una forma de insurrección permanente, y ella no admite las camisas de fuerza. Todas las tentativas destinadas a doblegar su naturaleza airada, díscola, fracasarán. La literatura puede morir pero no será nunca conformista. (Vargas Llosa: “La literatura es fuego” - 1967) [Literature as instrument of social and political critique]

4. …la creación literaria es una tentativa de recuperación y a la vez de exorcismo de ciertos fantasmas. Cuando uno escribe está tratando de librarse de algo que lo atormenta, que no es del todo claro para él, y a la vez está tratando de rescatar, de revivir, de salvar del olvido cierto tipo de experiencias que lo han marcado más profundamente que otras y que no quiere dejar morir, que no quiere que desaparezcan. (Vargas Llosa: interview 1967) [note different view of literature to that expressed in Q3.]

Vargas Llosa on autobiography

5. Writing a novel is a ritual like strip tease. Very much like the girl who, under bold spotlights, sheds her garments and bares one by one her secret charms, the novelist, too, reveals his intimate self through his novels. But, of course, there are differences. What the novelist reveals of himself are not his secret charms, like the stripper, but rather the demons that torment and obsess him, the ugliest parts of himself: his nostalgia, his rancour, his regrets. Another difference is that a stripper starts out dressed and ends up naked, while the opposite is true in the case of the novelist: he starts out bare and ends up covered up. The personal experiences (those lived, dreamed, heard, read) which were the initial stimuli for the writing of the story become so maliciously disguised during the creative process that when the novel is finished no one, often not even the novelist himself, can easily hear the autobiographical heartbeat that inevitably pulses in all fiction. To write a novel is to engage in a reverse strip tease, and all novelists are discreet exhibitionists. (Vargas Llosa: Historia secreta de la novela)

On Varguitas – autobiography as ‘strip tease in reverse’

6. En ese tiempo remoto, yo era muy joven y vivía con mis abuelos en una quinta de paredes blancas de la calle Ocharán, en Miraflores. Estudiaba en San Marcos, Derecho, creo, resignado a ganarme más tarde la vida con una profesión liberal, aunque, en el fondo, me hubiera gustado más llegar a ser escritor. (11)[2]

7. [Julia y yo]…hicimos varias veces el amor, con fuego que renacía cada vez, diciéndonos, mientras nuestras manos y labios aprendían a conocerse y hacerse gozar, que nos queríamos y que nunca nos mentiríamos ni nos engañaríamos ni nos separaríamos… (371) [Corny and explicit. Provides sense of gritty ‘realism’]

8. Escribo. Escribo que escribo. Mentalmente me veo escribir que escribo y también puedo verme ver que escribo. Me recuerdo escribiendo ya y también viéndome que escribía. Y me veo recordando que me veo escribir y me recuerdo viéndome recordar que escribía y escribo viéndome escribir que recuerdo haberme visto escribir que me veía escribir que recordaba haberme visto escribir que escribía y que escribía que escribo que escribía. (Salvador Elizondo, El Grafógrafo) [Self-awareness of writer-as-writer].

9. [leía] todos los escritores risueños que se ponían a mi alcance, desde Mark Twain y Bernard Shaw hasta Jardie Poncela y Fernández Flórez. Pero como siempre, no me salía y Pascual y el Gran Pablito iban contando las cuartillas que yo mandaba al canasto. (120) [suggests that literature is always ‘intertextual’ – that is always in some senses the result of multiple textual ‘influences’, a process of addition and expansion, rather than one of direct, unmediated (self-)expression].

10. – Pero si no fue así, pero si lo has puesto todo patas arriba – me decía, sorprendida y hasta enojada – pero si no fue eso lo que dijo, pero si…

Yo angustiadísimo, hacía un alto para informarle que lo que escuchaba no era la relación fiel de la anécdota que me había contado, sino un cuento, un cuento, y que todas las cosas añadidas o suprimidas eran recursos para conseguir ciertos efectos. (151-2) [Storytelling as falsification]

11. [Javier to Varguitas:] “En el fondo, estás muerto de las ganas de que haya ese escándalo para tener de qué escribir” (241). [‘Real experience’ determined by literary paradigms. So, to conclude this section, does Varguitas really ‘take off his clothes’ to show us his real self? Or does he in fact dress himself up, and dress up his own reality to make it something altogether different?]

On Pedro Camacho – fiction as expression of writer’s ‘demons’

12. There is no way in which to believe in Camacho’s imaginary world or to sympathize with him. It is scrupulously unreal and perverse. His mind is incapable of conceiving a romantic, familial, or friendly relationship without inevitably dashing it to spectacular disaster: he is interested in catastrophes, the more devastating the better. (Oviedo 1978: 173) [Is this really the language of soap opera?]

13. …frente ancha, nariz aguileña, mirada penetrante, rectitud y bondad en el espíritu. (pp. 29; 77; 127; 167; 216; 254; 308; 350; 397) [Reflection of ‘real’ Pedro Camacho?]

14. un ser pequeñito y menudo, en el límite mismo del hombre de baja estatura y el enano, con una nariz grande y unos ojos extraordinariamente vivos, en los que bullía algo excesivo. (23) […it seems not]

15. El artista [PC] había dogmatizado, con fuego, sobre los cincuenta años del hombre. La edad del apogeo cerebral y de la fuerza sensual, decía, de la experiencia digerida. La edad en que se era más deseado por las mujeres y más temido por los hombres. / Deduje que el escriba boliviano tenía cincuenta años y que lo aterraba la vejez: un rayo de debilidad en ese espíritu marmóreo. (73) [Text as site where unconscious desires/fantasies projected].

16. [Mientras recorríamos los transversales del jirón de la Unión buscando un veneno, el artista me contó que los ratones de la pensión La Tapada habían llegado a extremos intolerables.]

—Si se contentaran con correr bajo mi cama, no me importaría, no son niños, a los animales no les tengo fobia—me explicó, mientras olfateaba con su nariz protuberante unos polvos amarillos […]—. Pero estos bigotudos se comen mi sustento, cada noche mordisquean las provisiones que dejo tomando el fresco en la ventana. No hay más, debo exterminarlos. (190-1) [Does this explain Téllez’s raticidal fantasies in Ch.8?]

On popular culture:

17. Despite my vigilance, I emerge from every visit to the cinema morally and intellectually the worse. (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, §5) [Modernists often scornful and snooty about popular culture].

18. Los amores de un bebé y una anciana que además es algo así como su tía – me dijo una noche Julita, mientras cruzábamos una noche el Parque Central –. Cabalito para un radioteatro de Pedro Camacho. (112) [A good reason not to go to bed with your aunt?]

19. …the interruptions and delays in the completion of Marito’s courtship mirror the instances of narrative interruption that epitomize both the endings of Camacho’s soap opera episodes and Marito’s abortive attempts to write a successful story. (Booker, 70)

20. [PC’s book of literary quotes] El libro, publicado en tiempos prehistóricos por Espasa Calpe […] era de un autor desconocido y de prontuario pomposo […] y el título era extenso: ‘Diez Mil Citas Literarias de los Cien Mejores Escritores del Mundo’. Tenía un subtítulo: ‘Lo que dijeron Cervantes, Shakespeare, Molière, etc., sobre Dios, la Vida, la Muerte, el Amor, el Sufrimiento.’ (67) [Parallels with Varguitas’ own plagiarism?]

21. Te parezco tu mama y por eso te provoca hacerme confidencias – me psicoanalizó la tía Julia –. Así que el hijo de Dorita resultó bohemio, vaya, vaya. Lo malo es que te vas a morir de hambre, hijito. (109) [Julia as symbolic mother – not just aunt. What does this tell us about authorship? By becoming his mother does she not also beget Vargas the writer and the novel that we read?]

On Postmodernism [just some ideas that you might want to explore]

22. Jean-François Lyotard defines postmodernism as ‘Incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1979). [Metanarratives = Marxism/Freudian psychoanalysis. First one proposes Revolution as solution to the history of class struggle; second one proposes ‘the talking cure’ as way of curing mankind of the unhappiness that has ensued from thousands of years of civilization].

23. Umberto Eco: post-modernism as tendency to replay/revisit the past with irony.

24. Fredric Jameson: post-modernism as logic of late capitalism.

25. [FJ on postmodernist treatment of pop culture]: whilst the earlier texts ‘quote’ the materials of mass culture in order to parody them, postmodernist texts ‘incorporate them to the point where many of our older critical and evaluative categories (founded precisely on the radical differentiation of modernist and mass culture) no longer seem functional’ (Jameson, p. 64)

26. [Where does this leave literature?] Have postmodernist texts absorbed the fully commodified productions of mass commercial culture in such a way as to re-accentuate them and give them new energy, or has mass culture simply absorbed literature, leaving us with a postmodernism that is itself fully commodified? (Booker, p. 56)

Plots of the re-written versions of Pedro Camacho’s ‘radioteatros’:[3]

Ch. 2: Doctor Alberto Quinteros goes to the society wedding of his niece Eliana, one of the most beautiful girls in Lima – daughter of Roberto/Margarita. Eliana is set to marry the good but unsophisticated Pelirrojo Atúnez but faints at the wedding, Quinteros discovers that she is pregnant with brother Richard’s child. [Parallels with the love-triangle between Varguitas, Julia and Nancy?]

Ch. 4: Sgt Lituma (a character from VLL’s novel La casa verde) receives orders, with colleague Arévalo, to kill an African stowaway whom he finds naked in the port of Callao, near Lima. Lituma knows that the order is immoral and is repulsed by it, but feels reluctant to disobey his superiors.

Ch. 6: The judge Dr Pedro Barreda y Zaldívar and his secretary Dr Zelaya investigate the rape of a minor, Sarita Huanca Salaverría, by a Jehovah’s witness, Gumercindo Tello. When the girl enters the judge’s room she hoists up skirt and re-enacts the rape in explicit detail. Judge suspects that she had acted like a Lolita to seduce Gumercindo. When Gumercindo Tello meets the judge he tries to convert Judge to being a Jehova’s witness, before threatening to castrate himself to prove his innocence. [Gruesome details – parallel with Varguitas’ tendency to reveal everything about his own love life?]

Ch. 8: Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui, son of Mayte, sees his sister being eaten alive by rats in Tingo María in the Amazon. Fanatically dedicates life to pest control. Years later marries ugly Zoila Saravia Durán. Becomes obsessed by punctuality, economy and decency and turns violent when sees his daughters in bikinis on a magazine cover. At the end he is beaten up, possibly murdered, by wife and daughters. [Written around the time that Pedro Camacho gets driven insane by the rats in his pension].

Ch. 10: A travelling salesman of medical goods, Lucho Abril Marroquín, runs over a five-year old girl. As he gets out to attend to her a passing lorry runs over both of them, killing a guardia civil at the same time. Having recovered in hospital LAB develops a strong phobia of cars and goes to see a therapist, Dr Lucía Acémila, who in attempt to rid him of his phobias instils a Herod complex in him (desire to kill children). Now, characters from other radioteatros start to appear. At the end his boss at medical laboratory becomes the ‘Amazonian’ Federico Téllez Unzátegui from chapter 8. When wife gets pregnant they have to return to Acémila to cure his infanticidal Herod complex. [Note the fixation now with fanatics: all reminiscent of Brother Francisco in Pantaleón y las visitadoras].

Ch. 12: Sebastián Bergua and his lame wife Margarita move from Arequipa to Lima to set up a boarding house to further the piano career of their daughter Rosa. Rosa is obsessed that every man she sees is trying to rape her. A travelling salesman and religious fanatic Ezequiel Delfín (who later becomes Lucho Abril Marroquín) attacks Sebastián with a knife and tries to rape Margarita, even though the family lawyer claims that the family had in fact tried to attack him – as the end of Lucho Abril’s own story.

Ch. 14: Seferino Huanca Leyva, the son of a black woman who’d been raped (‘La negra teresita’), becomes a priest through the generosity of a large landowner – Mayte Unzátegui, Federico Téllez’s father. Defends masturbation as a religious practice (hence ‘Huanca’) and promotes prostitution. Then has fight with a popular healer, Jaime Concha (Lituma’s assistant in Ch. 2), and Sebastián Bergua (from Ch. 12), whom he plans to burn alive. At end he is knifed by mad Ezequiel Delfín from Ch.12 (who is also a reincarnation of Gumercindo Tello and Lucho Abril Marroquín).

Ch. 16: The aristocratic Joaquín Hinostroza Bellmont (later Marroquín), becomes famous and fanatical football ref after visiting a number of psychologists like Dr Lucía Acémila. Falls in love with Sarita Haunca Salaverría – now a ‘marimacho’ who has vowed chastity. In a football match which turns into a bullfight, most characters from other radioteatros present and everybody is killed either by bullet, by raging bull, or dies of a broken heart.

Ch. 18: The stunted popular musician Crisanto Maravillas falls in love with nun Sor Fátima – child of Elenita and Richard from Ch.2, but possibly also the five year old run over by Marroquín in Ch. 10. During a performance in a convent at which all other characters are present, an earthquake kills everybody.

Select Bibliography:

Critical works on Mario Vargas Llosa:

Booker, M. Keith, Vargas Llosa Amongst the Postmodernists (Gainseville: University Press of Florida,

1994) [UL classmark 744:4.c.95.180]

Kristal, Efraín, Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa (Liverpool: Liverpool UP,

1998) [UL classmark: 744:4.c.95.273]

O’Bryan-Knight, Jean, The Story of the Storyteller: La tía Julia y el escribidor, La historia de Mayta and El

hablador by Mario Vargas Llosa (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1995) [UL classmark: 744:4.c.95.193]

Oviedo, José Miguel, Mario Vargas Llosa: la invención de una realidad (Barcelona: Barral, 1977) [UL

classmark: 744:37.d.95.296]

Williams, Raymond Leslie, Mario Vargas Llosa (New York: Ungar, 1986) [UL classmark: 744:4.c.95.44]

Secondary and theoretical:

Adorno, Theodor W., Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1978) [UL Classmark:

9746.d.1604]

Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) [UL

classmark: 700:1.c.95.1733]

Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994) [UL classmark:

901.c.95.91]

Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, El boom de la novela latinoamericana (Caracas: Tiempo Nuevo, 1972) [UL

classmark: 9743.d.961]

Shaw, Donald, The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998)

[UL classmark: 744:4.c.95.288]

Other novels by Mario Vargas Llosa:

[1]A good introduction to the ‘Boom’ novel is Donald Shaw’s The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction (NY: State University of New York Press, 1988).

[2] References to the novel are to the Seix Barral edition (Barcelona 1996).

[3] *OJO* These are NOT the original ‘radioteatros’. Can you find out who has transcribed them? Thanks to Dr Steven Boldy for letting me draw on his synopses.