Landscape of violence
From the TLS of June 21, 1996
Orhan Pamuk

Is there such a thing as Third World literature? Is it possible, without being parochial and vulgar, to distinguish the essential features of the literatures of Third World countries? At best, as employed in the writings of Edward Said, the concept has helped to illuminate the multiplicity and diversity of the off-centre literatures, their non-Westernness, the idea of nationalism. At worst, elaborations on the concept of Third World literature, such as national allegories, are ways of politely evading the complexity and richness of whole continents of literatures. Borges began writing his short stories and essays in the Argentina of the 1930s, a Third World country by any standards, but his central place in world literature today is indisputable.
Yet there is a peculiar way of writing fiction in such countries, which is marked less by the writer's off-centre location than by his awareness of it, and Mario Vargas Llosa's work is a good example. What characterizes this kind of fiction is not the presence of off-centre problems - say, the social location of a "peripheral" country (although the social problems of Peru are everywhere in abundance in Vargas Llosa's fiction) - but the writer's way of relating himself to a real or imaginary centre of creativity where the main problems of his art are posed. What is crucial here is the writer's acceptance of his exile from where the history of his art is made. This is not necessarily a geographical exile (as in the case of Vargas Llosa, who spent most of his creative life not in his Peru but in Europe, at the centre of Western civilization), may sometimes be self-imposed and often relieves the author from the "anxiety of influence".
In this kind of fiction, the problems of originality do not engage the author in an obsessive dialogue with a father-figure or a precursor, because he realizes that the freshness of his subject-matter, the novelty of his geographical location, and even the new readership that he is addressing, will grant him an authenticity.
In one of the early pieces in Making Waves, Vargas Llosa reviews Simone de Beauvoir's novel Les Belles Images. He congratulates her for writing an excellent novel and for not being overshadowed by the authors of the "nouveau roman" who were fashionable at the time, whom he finds increasingly weak. The greatest merit of Simone de Beauvoir's novel, according to the young Vargas Llosa, is "to have made use of" the forms and expressive modes of Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Butor and Beckett for her own purposes, which were quite different from theirs.
This notion of "using" other authors' philo-sophies and techniques surfaces in an essay on Sartre. Vargas Llosa in his later years found Sartre's fiction to be humourless and lacking in mystery, his essays clear but politically confusing, and his art dated and unoriginal. He regrets having been so much influenced and even confused by him in his Marxist youth. His dis-illusionment, Vargas Llosa tells us, occurred in the summer of 1964, when in a notorious interview in Le Monde, Sartre, comparing literature to a child dying of hunger in a Third World country, implied that writing fiction is a luxury that can only be permitted with good conscience in prosperous and just societies. Yet Sartre's rational reasoning and his conviction that literature could never be a game, Vargas Llosa admits, were "useful", for they helped him to organize his life; they were a valuable guide to the labyrinth of culture and politics. This seemingly rational approach to inspiration, to the usefulness of other authors' inventions, and the constant awareness of being off-centre mark a certain naivety (a quality Vargas Llosa says Sartre lacks) and vitality which are felt not only in his early essays and book reviews, but other auto-biographical pieces in Making Waves as well.
Making Waves is a collection of essays and reviews, chronicling Vargas Llosa's heartfelt involvement in the literary and political events of the past thirty years. The book is extremely readable and Vargas Llosa is always engaging, whether the subject is his son's involvement with Rastafarians, the political profile of Nicaragua at the hands of the Marxist Sandinistas in 1985, or the World Cup in Spain in 1982. His literary heroes include Camus, whom he confesses he read dispassionately in his youth because of Sartre's strong influence; only years later, after a terrorist attack in Lima, did he read Camus's essay on violence in history, The Rebel, and realized that he preferred him to Sartre. His praise for Sartre's essays, that they go straight to "the essential point", is also true for most of the essays in Making Waves.
Sartre is a problematic character, perhaps even a father-figure for Vargas Llosa. John Dos Passos, whom Sartre so much admired and was influenced by, is dear to him as well, for more or less the same reasons: his lack of sentimentality and invention of narrative techniques. Vargas Llosa himself later used these techniques in his novels (as Sartre did). Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook is praised as a good example of a "committed" novel in the "Sartrean definition" of the term; that is, a book "rooted in the debates, myths and violence of its time". Of all the writers Vargas Llosa is genuinely interested in and wrote about - including Joyce, Hemingway, and Bataille - Faulkner is the one he has the highest praise for and admits to being heavily influenced by. Most of his comments on the formal in-genuity of Faulkner's novels, in an essay on Sanctuary, are relevant to his own novels as well. In fact, Vargas Llosa's observation that in Sanctuary the scenes are juxtaposed, rather than dissolving into each other, is even truer of his own fiction. This technique also appears in his new novel, Death in the Andes, which is crammed with voices, stories and comments, the continuity of which is ruthlessly broken.
Set in remote and isolated corners of the Andes, in decaying and desolate communities, empty valleys, mines, mountain roads, Death in the Andes tells the story of a series of disappearances, most of them possibly murders. The logic behind these killings is investigated by a corporal, Lituma, whose name will not be unfamiliar to the followers of Vargas Llosa's fiction, and his companion, a member of the Guardia Civil, Tomas Carreno. They interrogate people, wander around the country, tell each other stories of their love affairs and are constantly on the alert for an ambush by Maoist guerrillas. The people they meet, juxtaposed with the stories they tell, form a panoramic and realistic picture of rural Peru today, its misery and pain.
The suspects are members of Shining Path, Peru's Maoist guerrilla movement, and a strange local couple who are running a cantina and are seen performing ceremonies reminiscent of ancient Inca rituals. The description of the illogical brutality of various political murders by Shining Path, and the growing possibility that the murders may be related to some kind of Inca-inspired sacrificial rituals, produce an atmo-sphere of dark irrationalism, enhanced by the violent Andes landscape. Death is everywhere in this book, and its presence is felt more than the poverty, the guerrilla war, the nature and the hopelessness of Peru.
It is as if Vargas Llosa the modernist had lost his optimism, and, like a truly postmodern anthropologist, decided to pay attention to Peru's irrationalism, its violence, its pre-enlightenment values and rituals. Myths, ancestral gods, mountain spirits, demons, satan and witches are mentioned everywhere in the book, perhaps more than their presence in the story warrants. "But of course, we make a mistake when we try to understand these killings with our minds", says one character. "They have no rational explanation."
The texture of Death in the Andes is immune to the irrationalism it describes. Plotting a detective novel, a genre based on the celebration of Cartesian rationalism, together with the ir-rational atmosphere that hints at the hidden roots of brutality - these two contradictory objects do not help to produce a new form. This is, after all, a typical Vargas Llosa book; although occasionally complex, it is always controlled, and its voices are well orchestrated; the beauty and the strength of the novel is based on its tight and well organized composition.
While there is a strong intention to by-pass the worn-out modernistic as- sumptions about "Third World" countries in Death in the Andes, this is not a post-modern novel as , say, Gravity's Rainbow is. The image of "the other" as an irrational being, and all the other elements that are usually associated with this kind of reasoning - magic, rituals, strange landscapes and brutality - abound in the book. Yet one does not read it as a novel illustrating vulgar generalizations about "the other", but as a playful, often funny, realistic text that derives strength from its being a reliable chronicle of the real events that take place in everyday life in Peru. The capture of a small town by the guerrillas and the trials that follow, or a melo-dramatic love-affair between a prostitute and a soldier, have the plausibility of a convincing reportage. The Peru of Death in the Andes is a country "no one can understand", a place where everyone complains about his miserable salary and the stupidity of risking one's neck for it. Although he has always been experimental, Vargas Llosa is one of the most realistic of the Latin American writers.
The main character, Corporal Lituma, appears, Balzac/Faulkner fashion, in other Vargas Llosa novels. He was a major figure in Who Killed Palomino Molero?, which is also partly a detective novel, had two lives in The Green House, the novel named after a brothel, the establishment he remembers in Death in the Andes, and was an imaginary character who terrorized the underworld of El Callao in a soap opera, in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
The treatment of this down-to-earth figure, who does his best to serve in the army without any fanaticism, has a reasonable degree of honesty, strong instinct to survive and a cynical sense of humour, is very sympathetic. Vargas Llosa, who studied in a military high school in Peru, is at his best when writing about military life, as in the rivalry and competition of young cadets of The Time of the Hero or (at his most humorous) in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, a satire of bureaucracy and sex in the army. He is brilliant when he pays attention to the nuances of male friendships, the fragile moments of macho sensibilities, tough guys who hopelessly fall in love with whores, the right moment for a vulgar joke to end male senti-mentality that goes too far.
His cynicism can be extremely funny, yet it is never pointless. From his earlier novels, it is obvious that Vargas Llosa prefers wise realists and cynical moderates to radical utopians and fanatics. Here, the good guys are soldiers, while there is no attempt to understand the psychology of the Shining Path guerrillas, who are represented as purely illogical and almost absurdly evil.
This is not of course entirely unrelated to Vargas Llosa's own political change, well chronicled in Making Waves, from a young modernist Marxist enchanted by the Cuban revolution to a mature, self-conscious liberal, who in the early 1990s, counted himself as one of "the only two writers in the world who admire Margaret Thatcher and detest Fidel Castro", and who scolded Guenter Grass for saying in early 1980s that Latin American countries should follow "the example of Cuba". After reading the account of the Shining Path guerrillas in Death in the Andes, it is striking to come across, in one of the early articles, a touching and tender homage to a Marxist guerrilla, a friend who had died in 1965, "in an engagement with the Peruvian army". Do guerrillas cease to be human after our youth ends, or is it only because after a certain age we rarely have friends among the guerrillas? The charm of Vargas Llosa's writing and the vitality of his convictions are so engaging that one may tend to sympathize, if not with all of his political views, at least with his boyishly heartfelt way of relating to them.
"What does it mean to be a writer in Peru?" he asks in Making Waves, in an article on the early death of Sebasti n Salazar Bondy, one of the country's most successful authors. It is easy to identify with the fury of young Vargas Llosa, who says that every Peruvian writer is defeated in the end, not only because there are no readers and publishers in Peru, but because writers who resist and try to find ways of protecting themselves against "the poverty, the ignorance or the hostility of the environment" are treated as lunatics, destined either for an unreal existence or exile. His youthful hatred of the Peruvian bourgeoisie, who he said were "more stupid than the rest" and did not read books, his complaint that "Peruvian contributions" to world literature were scarce and poor, his dream of going to live in Europe, and the hunger he felt for non-Peruvian literature, are signs that beneath the singular voice of Vargas Llosa there is a painful awareness of being off-centre.
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