The war of the end of the world or the end of ideology

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Vargas Llosa, it should be said, has only ever praisedRebellion in the backlands, describing it as ‘one of the books I have read with the most amazement, enthusiasm and passion’. He has also called it ‘an essential book for understanding what Latin America is or, better still, what Latin America is not’ – a point I shall return to later on (Vargas Llosa, 1991 Vargas Llosa, M 1991 The author's favorite of his novels: The war of the end of the world In Mario Vargas Llosa: A Writer's Reality edited by Myron I. Licktblau. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 123 41 [Google Scholar]: 124). See for instance José Miguel Oviedo, ‘Vargas Llosa en Canudos: versión clasica de un clasico’; Sara Castro‐Klarén, ‘Locura y Dolor: La elaboración de la historia en Os Sertões y La guerra del fin del mundo’ and ‘Santos and Cangaceiros: inscription without discourse in Os Sertões and La guerra del fin del mundo’; Renata Wasserman, ‘Mario Vargas Llosa, Euclides da Cunha and the Strategy of Intertextuality’; Alfred MacAdam ‘Euclides da Cunha y Mario Vargas Llosa: meditaciones intertextuales’; Marco Codebo ‘The Vision of the Outsider in Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertões, Mario Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo and José J. Veiga's A Casca da Serpente’ (The image of the outsider in literature, media and society, edited by Will Wright, Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 2002, pp. 82–7); Hernan Loyola (1991) Canudos: Euclides da Cunha y Mario Vargas Llosa frente a Caliban’, Casa de Las Americas, 32 (185): 64–80. ‘The narrative montage of series that are juxtaposed, that succeed, lean on and intersect one another, produce the effect of giving more import to perspectives, that is, to the ideological’ (Montenegro, 1984 Montenegro, P. 1984. La relatividad de perspectivas en La guerra del fin del mundo. Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, 10(20): 311–21. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 320, translation mine). Angel Rama delineates in detail eight different groupings or perspectives. See ‘La guerra del fin del mundo: Una obra maestra del fanatismo artístico’ (1982). See for instance Walnice Nogueira Galvão (1974 Galvão WN 1974 No Calor da Hora: A guerra de Canudos nos jornais, 4a Expedição São Paulo: Atica [Google Scholar]), José Augusto Cabral Barreto Bastos (1995 Bastos JACB Incompreensível e Bárbaro Inimigo: a guerra simbólica contra Canudos Salvador: EDUFBA 1995 [Google Scholar]), and Lizir Arcanjo Alves (1997 Alves LA 1997 Humor e sátira na Guerra de Canudos Salvador: EGBA [Google Scholar]). ‘The General Artur Oscar … showed me various kinds of bullets recovered from the shoot‐out last night. They are made of steel and, although some are similar to Mannlicher bullets, they are unknown. Undoubtedly they are projectiles from modern weapons that we do not possess. All of this leads one to believe that this conflagration in the backlands has deeper roots’ (Da Cunha, 1939 Da Cunha E 1939 Canudos: Diario de uma expedição Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio Editora [Google Scholar]: 67, translation mine). The manuscripts left behind by Conselheiro indeed articulate such a position, although one may wonder to what extent those manuscripts are representative of all antagonisms to the Republic. SeeAntonio Vicente Mendes Maciel (1974 Mendes Maciel, AV 1974 António Conselheiro e Canudos. revisão histórica): A obra manuscrita de António Conselheiro e que pertenceu a Euclides da Cunha edited by Ataliba Nogueira. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional [Google Scholar]) and Alexandre Otten (1993 Otten, A. 1993. A Influência do Ideário Religioso na Construção da Comunidade de Belo Monte. Luso‐Brazilian Review, XXX(2): 71–95. [Google Scholar]). In ‘Los quiebraquilos’ Vargas Llosa is explicit in his critique of materialist interpretations of events like Canudos or the Quebra‐Quilos revolts in Brazil, textualized in this novel in the figure of Gall: ‘One can object to this attitude of explaining everything the downtrodden do in terms of a system of classification whereby the people always appear rebelling in defense of material rights, understood in terms of modern ideology. There is a secret paternalism, and even contempt, in the act of interpreting those “irrational” rebels as minors who do not really know what they are doing and which the contemporary historian, lord of ideology, explains by retroactively turning those poor souls into adults, recruiting them for a history understood as an ineluctable progression towards the triumph of good and justice. To do so is to do yet another injustice to those downtrodden who risked their lives trying to destroy the indestructible; in addition to everything that was stolen from them in life, it implies robbing them of the little that belongs to them: their originality’ (Vargas Llosa, 1986 Vargas Llosa, M 1986 Los quiebraquilos In Contra Viento y Marea Barcelona: Seix Barral 216 20 [Google Scholar]: 218, my translation). In ‘The author's favorite’, Vargas Llosa writes: ‘unfortunately … intellectuals in Latin America are still ideologically oriented in their approach to political, social and cultural problems … the pragmatic approach is … more civilized and better able to understand what reality is’ (Vargas Llosa, 1991 Vargas Llosa, M 1991 The author's favorite of his novels: The war of the end of the world In Mario Vargas Llosa: A Writer's Reality edited by Myron I. Licktblau. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 123 41 [Google Scholar]: 125). Much has been written on Vargas Llosa's shift to liberalism. See for instance Gerald Martin, (1987 Martin G 1987 Mario Vargas Llosa: errant knight of the liberal imagination In Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey edited by John King. London: Faber & Faber 205 33 [Google Scholar]) and William Rowe (1992 Rowe W 1992 Liberalism and authority: The case of Mario Vargas Llosa In On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture edited by G. Yúdice, J. Franco and J. Flores. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 45 64 [Google Scholar]). One of the sharpest and most provocative essays on this subject is Neil Larsen's ‘Mario Vargas Llosa: The realist as neo‐liberal’ (2000). He criticizes the attempt to ‘find corroboration for Vargas Llosa's rightward political evolution directly on the plane of his aesthetics’ (p. 161) and makes a very suggestive argument for disarticulating his realism from his liberalism, claiming that with his recurring use of metalepsis (what Vargas Llosa calls the ‘vasos comunicantes’) he has produced a narrative form which ‘permits the extreme duality of a “postcolonial” social and historical formation like Peru to be represented as unifiedas a whole, on the level of the actions of its individual members’ (Larsen, 2000 Larsen, N. 2000. Mario Vargas Llosa: the realist as neo‐liberal. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 9(2): 155–79. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]: 174). For Larsen, Vargas Llosa is able to do so despite his professed political philosophy but because of his localization in Peru, a liminal historical space where the form and content of modernity begin to fail to reproduce each other. My differences with Larsen are two: First, Larsen can link aesthetics to power structures and bypass the issue of Vargas Llosa's professed beliefs by pointing to his location in a ‘dismodern’ structure. Yet in so far as I am, first, trying to make a distinction between Da Cunha and Vargas Llosa (both located in ‘dismodernity’) and, second, trying to move in this essay towards Homi Bhabha's conceptualization of realism in terms of ‘address’ rather than its relation to a referent, the issue of political projects seems inescapable. Second, while I find his argument very persuasive with regard to Conversation in the Cathedral I am less convinced that The war of the end of the world successfully represents the postcolonial historical formation of Brazil. For example, Larsen argues that the concatenation of the ‘imported, predatory positivism of Moreira Cesar’ and the ‘apocalyptic, syncretic Christianity’ of the Counselor means that the ‘destruction of Canudos, would‐be citadel of anti‐modernity, already foretells the collapse of the victorious modernity in whose name it is destroyed’ (Larsen, 2000 Larsen, N. 2000. Mario Vargas Llosa: the realist as neo‐liberal. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 9(2): 155–79. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]: 175). What Larsen (but also, as I am trying to argue, Vargas Llosa) misses, is the possibility that it is Da Cunha and not Moreira Cesar who articulates the successful (and not collapsed) discourse of modernity in whose name Canudos is destroyed. This is pointed out by Montenegro as well: ‘One perspective that stands out from all the others and that is not neutralized, that knows the story from all its angles, interpreting them and extrapolating them to the twentieth century, like Vargas Llosa, is that of the Baron’ (Montenegro, 1984 Montenegro, P. 1984. La relatividad de perspectivas en La guerra del fin del mundo. Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, 10(20): 311–21. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 321, translation mine) Sara Castro Klarén offers a different reading of the Baron: ‘Not even the distrustful Baron [can] … achieve a coherent vision of the story that Canudos finally re‐presents’ (Castro Klarén, 1984 Castro‐Klarén, S. 1984. Locura y Dolor: La elaboración de la historia en Os Sertões y La guerra del fin del mundo. Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, 10(26): 207–31. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 210, translation mine). Gerald Martin argues that Vargas Llosa, unlike other Boom writers, had always been realist: ‘what I was asserting in 1971 was that Vargas Llosa's orientation was that of the great realists of the nineteenth century (Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy) and their twentieth‐century successors (Dos Passos, Faulkner)’ (Martin, 1987 Martin G 1987 Mario Vargas Llosa: errant knight of the liberal imagination In Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey edited by John King. London: Faber & Faber 205 33 [Google Scholar]: 209). José Miguel Oviedo concurs that his early production ‘is distinguished by his unavoidable adhesion to the canon of “Realism” renovated with postmodern narrative techniques (Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner)’ (Oviedo, 1982 Oviedo, JM. 1982. Vargas Llosa en Canudos: versión clasica de un clasico. Eco: Revista de Cultura del Occidente, 40(6): 641–64. [Google Scholar]: 641, translation mine). Oviedo also writes that in The war of the end of the world ‘The virtuosity is there, but willfully submitted to a control, in favor of a more “discrete”, more transparent, more neutral writing: that of an author who wants his story to tell itself, who wants to dissolve into a kind of invisibility. One can say that Vargas Llosa does not write this story, but that this story writes itself through him, like a medium whose voice is the voice of others’ (Oviedo, 1982 Oviedo, JM. 1982. Vargas Llosa en Canudos: versión clasica de un clasico. Eco: Revista de Cultura del Occidente, 40(6): 641–64. [Google Scholar]: 660, translation mine). Oviedo relates this posture to the fact that this novel is a rewriting of Rebellion in the backlands: ‘in truth he does not tell [these stories], he re‐tells them’ (Oviedo, 1982 Oviedo, JM. 1982. Vargas Llosa en Canudos: versión clasica de un clasico. Eco: Revista de Cultura del Occidente, 40(6): 641–64. [Google Scholar]: 662, translation mine). Martin claims his realism and liberalism are at odds in this novel and lead to ‘conceptual paralysis’: Vargas Llosa ‘opted to write a novel about the nineteenth century in nineteenth‐century vein.… It is therefore a novel of evident classical pretensions, with no obstrusive technical devices and no attempt to divert or confuse his audience. The result is a powerful, austere and generally lucid work which nevertheless, for this reader at least, runs out of steam at the climactic moment because its internal logic requires the kind of ideological coherence which Vargas Llosa himself had so consistently rejected in earlier days – all the more ironical, this, since the conclusion of the work emphasizes the illusory nature of ideologies. The classical transparency which Vargas Llosa achieves, now that his ideology has moved to the right, here produces a conceptual paralysis’ (Martin, 1987 Martin G 1987 Mario Vargas Llosa: errant knight of the liberal imagination In Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey edited by John King. London: Faber & Faber 205 33 [Google Scholar]: 222). In a discussion in 1965 with Luis Agüero, Juan Larco and Ambrosio Fornet on La ciudad y los perros, Vargas Llosa's admiration for chivalric romances is expressed as a function of their totalizing impulse: ‘The chivalric romances … are attempts to grasp reality in all of its levels, they pretend to say everything, to grasp everything. I think the best are the ones that have approached this position … the great novels do not mutilate reality but add to it; not only are they original but they give a new testimony, they are totalizing’ (cited in Standish, 1984 Standish, P. 1984. Acotación a la teoria novelistica de Mario Vargas Llosa. Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, 10(20): 305–10. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 308). According to Standish, Vargas Llosa notes that the second admirable characteristic of chivalric romances is their rejection of a didactic posture, which is also what renders them more subversive of the established order. In a position that is close to Martin's, Cornejo Polar argues instead that the clash between different worlds and perspectives in the novel – which is mechanical rather than dialectical – does not include an instance that explains the antagonisms globally so that, unlike Rebellion in the backlands, the novel refuses the representation of a reality and foregrounds the absurdity and senselessness of history. He also points out, however, the connection between Vargas Llosa's rejection of ideologies in this novel and the anti‐ideological position he has assumed in the name of a pragmatic realism, commenting dryly in an aside ‘como si eso no fuera también una ideología’ (1984: 221). Such a move is not unique to this novel. Commenting on Conversation in the cathedral, William Rowe notes that while the text is dialogical, constituted by an exposure of voices which produces an analysis of power ‘there is also a nondialogical place, a situation of voyeuristic impotence, almost a fascination, with the smell of power, that overrides differences and becomes the single place of the reader’ (Rowe, 1992 Rowe W 1992 Liberalism and authority: The case of Mario Vargas Llosa In On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture edited by G. Yúdice, J. Franco and J. Flores. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 45 64 [Google Scholar]: 48). In The war of the end of the world the Baron textualizes the reader's non‐dialogical space of voyeuristic impotence. The Baron's attraction to the chameleon is one manifestation of what Angel Rama has identified as Vargas Llosa's answer to the brutality produced by ideology, one that is based on the following equivalence: violence is produced by fanaticism, fanaticism by idealism and idealism by a distance from reality. The solution, then (exemplified most notoriously in the erotic scene where the Baron forces himself on his wife's servant), is the cultivation of beauty, pleasure and the physical world. Rama criticizes such a posture as insufficient and contradictory: ‘The irrational impulses of the body are positively valorized but any irrationalism of thought is invalidate.’ (Rama, 1982 Rama, A. 1982. La guerra del fin del mundo: Una obra maestra del fanatismo artístico. Eco: Revista de Cultura del Occidente, 40(6): 600–40. [Google Scholar]: 638, translation mine). Neil Larsen, on the other hand, writes that ‘Rama's reading of the novel is, in this instance, quite wrong: Vargas Llosa cannot be fairly accused of endorsing his alter ego's descent from temperate man of culture with conservative views into an embittered, cynical rapist out of a blindness for erotic and physical, as opposed to political, extremisms. Plotting such an end for the Baron is, to the contrary, both a frank admission of his “unfitness to rule” and a refusal to exempt the erotic from the larger social crisis that in fact turns into something violent and pathological. It is, if anything, a stroke of remarkable artistic integrity and brilliance, showing yet again how persistently Vargas Llosa the realist story‐teller eludes Vargas Llosa the counter‐revolutionary ideologue’ (Larsen, 2000 Larsen, N. 2000. Mario Vargas Llosa: the realist as neo‐liberal. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 9(2): 155–79. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]: 162). Montenegro asks: ‘Does this mean that Vargas Llosa, like the Baron, has fallen behind in an anachronistic vision?’ (Montenegro, 1984 Montenegro, P. 1984. La relatividad de perspectivas en La guerra del fin del mundo. Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, 10(20): 311–21. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 321, translation mine). Rowe argues that Vargas Llosa decontextualizes Canudos by allegorizing it so that it is not ‘seen as part of the historical resistance of the modern state on the part of the traditional society of the hinterlands. The destruction of “archaic” societies by modernization is placed within a tragic structure as “fated” ’ (Rowe, 1992 Rowe W 1992 Liberalism and authority: The case of Mario Vargas Llosa In On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture edited by G. Yúdice, J. Franco and J. Flores. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 45 64 [Google Scholar]: 57). And later: ‘Vargas Llosa cannot conceive of simultaneous and opposing sets of signs, that is, of a heterogeneous culture, but only of an alienated discourse as the sole way in which the Other can speak within the nation, leaving as the only option an eventual integration or disappearance of the Other into a single national discourse – an apologetics for acculturation. History is a question of “backward” or “forward”, or destruction of integration’ (Rowe, 1992 Rowe W 1992 Liberalism and authority: The case of Mario Vargas Llosa In On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture edited by G. Yúdice, J. Franco and J. Flores. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 45 64 [Google Scholar]: 61). ‘I only write about Peru and am only interested in writing about Peru.’ ‘Conversación con Vargas Llosa’ (entrevista por M.F.), Imagen, No. 6, 1–15 agosto, 1967: 5 (cited in Oviedo, 1982 Oviedo, JM. 1982. Vargas Llosa en Canudos: versión clasica de un clasico. Eco: Revista de Cultura del Occidente, 40(6): 641–64. [Google Scholar]: 645, my translation). In ‘The author's favorite’ he explains, ‘I felt that if I wrote a persuasive novel using Canudos as a setting for that story, I would perhaps be able to present in fiction the description of a continental phenomenon, something that every Latin American could recognize as part of his own past and in some cases his own present because in contemporary Latin America you still have Canudos in many countries. In Peru, for instance, we have a living Canudos in the Andes’ (Vargas Llosa, 1991 Vargas Llosa, M 1991 The author's favorite of his novels: The war of the end of the world In Mario Vargas Llosa: A Writer's Reality edited by Myron I. Licktblau. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 123 41 [Google Scholar]: 133). Popper once wrote that: ‘The historicist does not recognize that it is we who select and order the facts of history.’ Fabian distinguishes his project from that of Popper's by commenting that Popper ‘and other theorists of science inspired by him do not seem to realize that the problematic element in this assertion is not the constitution of history (who doubts that it is made, not given?) but the nature of the we’ (Fabian, 1987: x). This gesture is especially important in light of the dominant reception of Da Canha as someone who saw what his contemporaries did not. The analysis of Olímpio de Sousa Andrade is exemplary of this reading: ‘Like a powerful and highly sensitive antenna, his intelligence and intuition captured distant voices and sounds, lost in the air, unperceived by others, but which said everything.… Later discerning, clearly distinguishing what still seemed indistinct and confused in that clamor emitted by the centers of decision, his mastery and courage would transmit it to the stunned present in which he lived, and even more, to the future which could not ignore the movement of pieces in that surprising chess game.… And so he continued in his ceaseless search for an elusive truth’ (Andrade, 1975: 191, translation mine). Vargas Llosa, however, writes that ‘Although he [Da Cunha] was there and could see who the rebels were, in fact he was totally blind. He was an extremely honest intellectual who was so convinced of his ideas that he could see only what his ideology allowed him to see’ (Vargas Llosa, 1991 Vargas Llosa, M 1991 The author's favorite of his novels: The war of the end of the world In Mario Vargas Llosa: A Writer's Reality edited by Myron I. Licktblau. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 123 41 [Google Scholar]: 130). I am thinking here of Gyanendra Pandey's ‘The prose of otherness’, which describes the prose of otherness as one in which the violence of the state, naturalized as legitimate and treated in terms of ‘war’, ‘vigilance’ and ‘counter‐insurgency operation’ becomes more and more invisible. It is a necessary price, an ‘unfortunate fall‐out’ or residue left behind by the progress of a history whose structures are always known beforehand: ‘nationalism, capitalist and proletarian democracy, bureaucratic rationalism, the ideologies of science and development, all of which are encapsulated in the modern state formation’ (Pandey, 1994 Pandey G 1994 The prose of otherness Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha edited by D. Arnold and D. Hardiman. Delhi: Oxford University Press 188 221 [Google Scholar]: 193). Reason and history belong to the state, are part of its autobiography, while ‘violence belongs to the Other, those left behind by history’ (Pandey, 1994 Pandey G 1994 The prose of otherness Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha edited by D. Arnold and D. Hardiman. Delhi: Oxford University Press 188 221 [Google Scholar]: 193). The violence of those outside history is: ‘chaotic, uncontrolled, excessive and, almost always, illegitimate. Not Reason, but the nature of Indian society explained these “excesses” ’ (Pandey, 1994: 191). In Da Cunha's last scene, however, the violence of the state is visible in its absurdity. Said explains this by declaring that anyone who employs orientalism ‘will designate, name, point to, fix, what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality.… For all these functions it is frequently enough to use the simple copula is’ (cited in Bhabha, 1994 Bhabha H 1994 The location of culture New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]: 71). William Rowe makes a similar observation: ‘the Canudos of the War of the End of the Worldis more pathetic than threatening, and … its culture is something far less disturbing in Vargas Llosa's book than in da Cunha's, where the chaotic and elastic space of Canudos threatens to fully entangle the rationality of the Brazilian Republic and of the author himself’ (Rowe, 1992 Rowe W 1992 Liberalism and authority: The case of Mario Vargas Llosa In On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture edited by G. Yúdice, J. Franco and J. Flores. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 45 64 [Google Scholar]: 59). Sara Castro‐Klarén's ‘Santos and Cangaceiros: inscription without discourse in Os Sertões and La guerra del fin del mundo’ pursues the question of why the Conselheiro is speechless (either mad or silent) in both texts, why his discourse is not textualized, and answers that his discourse was ‘a critique that ignored, was in‐noscent, of modernity.… Such a critique is not easily embraced by modernity as part and parcel of its own discourse and that is why a modern novelist, fascinated as he may be by a santo and his jagunços, can not really re‐produce or imagine a discourse for a people who articulate their lives within a tradition that is basically other and thus alien to modernity’ (Casto Klarén, 1986 Castro‐Klarén, S. 1986. Santos and Cangaceiros: inscription without discourse in Os Sertões and La guerra del fin del mundo. MLN, 101(2): 366–88. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: 37).