Vargas Llosa's Kathie y el hipopotamo: The Theatre as a Self-Conscious Deception

Abstract

Although Mario Vargas Llosa is generally considered a newcomer to stage, his first written work, at age of 16, was in fact a drama titled La huida del Inca. Now, after three decades and twice that many novels, he has returned to medium of stage, first with enormously successful La senorita de Tacna (1981) and then with Kathie y el hipop6tamo (1983), which has received relatively scant critical attention.' Given that Vargas Llosa is first and foremost a novelist, it comes as no surprise that his theatrical works display shifting point of view, temporal dislocation, and fictional selfawareness so characteristic of his narratives. By foregrounding very process of creating fiction, author continues to explore in these two plays how and why of storytelling as well as nebulous line that separates these oral fictions from world of reality. Both works feature would-be novelists who actively and self-consciously engage in act of producing fiction, whether it be in form of actual storytelling, written narrative, or improvised drama. Like Pedro Camacho, indefatigable creator of popular soap operas in La tia Julia y el escribidor, these dramatic counterparts are intratextual storytellers, or what Robert Scholes might refer to as fabulators. Furthermore, as Jos6 Miguel Oviedo notes of La tia Julia, primary concern is again that of the writer in process of writingwriting about in his life, writing himself a life through his fiction (166). Yet, although both plays center on act of creating oral and written fictions, Kathie y el hipop6tamo is far more theatrical in its treatment of this fashionable topic. The task of writing fiction, so prominent in La sehorita de Tacna, becomes in Kathie a mere frame within which fictionalized writers themselves compose and perform dramatic scenes based on a personal past at once lived and imagined. The result is a complex and compelling interplay among framing fiction, inner dramas, and receiver of text, for whom game of perception involves a challenging and ultimately futile effort to distinguish fictitious from real. With a Pirandellian flair, Vargas Llosa lays bare theatre's ancient art of deception by deliberately flaunting fusion of art and life, truth and lie. Although some critics may dismiss Kathie as just one more exercise in theatrical self-consciousness, play concerns not only construction and destruction of illusion, but also and more importantly, modern man's need to dramatize-into-being his own existence. By bringing to fore very act of producing fiction, specifically in form of drama, Vargas Llosa enables us to see ourselves for what we really are -writers, directors, and performers of our own dramatic fictions, past, present, and future. In prologue to Kathie, aptly titled El teatro como ficci6n, dramatist makes clear his awareness of theatre as a unique form of fiction, specifically in its capacity to present a lifelike illusion to audience: Ningun genero manifiesta tan espl6ndidamente la dudosa naturaleza del arte como una representaci6n teatral (11). By virtue of its live, and in this sense real, presentation of events, whether they themselves be real or fictitious, theatre is inherently illusionistic. No other genre can convince its receiver of its own reality with as little effort and as much conviction as theatre. The confluence of reality and real-seeming artifice that occurs in Kathie owes in large measure to power of dra-