The Rights of Nature, the Rights of Fiction:

Mario Vargas Llosa and the Amazon

VICTORIA SARAMAGO

Few regions are as present in the work of Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa as
the Amazon. His first encounter with the Amazonian forest had a lasting impact on
him as a twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer in 1958, and the region figured in his
fiction around the time of his unsuccessful candidacy for Peru’s presidency in 1990.
He won the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1967 for his first Amazonian
novel, La casa verde (1966; translated as The Green House, 1968). He received the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, the same year his most recent Amazonian novel,
El sueño del celta (2010; translated as The Dream of the Celt, 2012), came out. While the
Amazonian rain forest has remained a source of interest for Vargas Llosa—in a
2001 interview, he defined it as “a world that was adventure, that had always
seduced and fascinated me as a reader” (Vargas Llosa and Williams 94)—his fierce
defense of neoliberal modernization has earned him not a few feuds with Indi-
genous groups and environmental activists for, on one hand, his contempt for
Indigenous cultures and their political agency and, on the other, his consistent
defense of modernization and industrialization at the expense of the area’s envi-
ronment.1 Alongside the polemical and often conflicting views that Vargas Llosa
expressed, his essays have been marked by a decades-long theorization of the
ability of fiction—and most specifically the ability of novels—to create an auto-
nomous reality that conserves its own features and does not involve any ethical
commitment toward referential reality.
While the Amazon has for centuries been a source of fascination for writers
and artists, ecocritical scholarship has offered new insights about what Felipe
Martı́nez-Pinzón and Javier Uriarte call a “literary geography” of the region. Lúcia
Sá’s foundational contribution sheds light on a “rain forest culture” that has
emerged from a rich intertextual dialogue between Indigenous cultures and non-
Amazonian authors, even as the former “have been repeatedly written out of his-
torical discourse” (xxvi). Focusing on the genre known as “novels of the jungle,”
Leslie Wylie takes a postcolonial approach, showcasing how the “reinvention of
tropical landscape aesthetics in the novela de la selva was, therefore, crucial to the
Spanish-American writer’s desire to contest and to supplant disabling cultural
stereotypes” (7). More recently, Jorge Marcone has shown, in “The Stone Guests,”
how Amazonian and Andean popular environmentalisms, such as movements
around the notion of “buen vivir,” offer alternatives to developmentalist models.
Taking a panoramic approach to literature on the Amazon produced mostly from

The University of Chicago’s Humanities Division Council generously supported the production
of this article.
1
Unless otherwise noted, all citations from texts that do not have published translations in
English were translated by Laura Colaneri.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 54:1 DOI 10.1215/00295132-8868761  2021 by Novel, Inc.

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the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century, Martı́nez-
Pinzón and Uriarte’s edited volume shows how a modern transnational Amazo-
nian imagination emerged. Covering a more recent corpus published from the
1950s on, when extractivism and deforestation took on new proportions across the
region, Charlotte Rogers (Mourning El Dorado) reveals the fundamental persistence
of the El Dorado myth.
The diverse yet enduring tropes and problems explored by these scholars appear,
often in polemical ways, in Vargas Llosa’s Amazonian novels. In dialogue with
these and other critical works, the present article asks how the Amazon’s envi-
ronmental and cultural diversity intersects with the problems posed by theories
and histories of the novel. I contend that changing perspectives on Amazonian
environments and their local populations in the mid- to late twentieth century are
thematized in Vargas Llosa’s novels on the Amazon and reflected in the trajectory
of their critical reception over the decades. His often hostile engagement with
Indigenous cultures, his ambivalent and even ethnocentric stances on cultural
stereotypes, his enduring fascination with the rain forest coupled with his defenses
of deforestation, his undeniable impact on Latin American fiction, and the breadth
of his aesthetic experimentation: all these factors make Vargas Llosa’s work an
exemplary case study for a critical convergence of the environmental humanities
with theories of the novel.
Critics and commentators have, across the decades, taken up the challenge of
reconciling Vargas Llosa’s literary work with his political activity, his profile as
a public intellectual, and his views on Indigenous and environmental issues.
These critics include Sara Castro-Klarén, Efraı́n Kristal, Ignacio López-Calvo, Jorge
Marcone, Mabel Moraña, Lúcia Sá, and Doris Sommer, among many others. This
article contributes to such discussions by proposing an alternative way of under-
standing the connections between Vargas Llosa’s novels and his political and
environmental views by emphasizing his own account of how fiction works.2 As
such, it examines Vargas Llosa’s environmental thought from the double perspec-
tive of his own theories of fiction and the ethics some of his novels dramatize.
Amazonian forest settings abet understanding both of literary representation in
Vargas Llosa’s novels and of his apparently contradictory statements on environ-
mental issues. My hypothesis is that some of these contradictions are explicable if
we consider his views on fiction as they emerge from his essays and apply those to
his literary work. Taking a different direction from critics who have focused on the
author’s most explosive declarations about Indigenous and environmental issues in
the 1980s and 1990s as they connect to El hablador, I argue that early formulations of
such controversial views already appear in his writings from the 1960s and early
1970s. Thus attending to his earlier fiction and essays reveals their continuities with
his later work and opinions.
Vargas Llosa’s defense of the ethical and ontological autonomy of literary work
does not entail an ethical stance toward the actual environments his fiction celebrates.

2
I understand a public intellectual as someone whose essays are widely read and discussed by a
public broader than his or her more immediate intellectual circle and whose opinions often exer-
cise some degree of influence over the public.

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 SARAMAGO VARGAS LLOSA AND THE AMAZON 21

On the contrary, a comparison of his theories of fiction with his fiction itself sug-
gests that the fictional Amazonian forest is, in Vargas Llosa’s view, disconnected
from any need to conserve the actual region to which his novels might appear to
refer. In spite of strongly affirming fiction’s autonomy and progressively denying,
over the course of his career, any ethical commitment that novels might imply
toward the realities they depict, his own literary works—especially later ones such
as El hablador (1987; translated as The Storyteller, 1989)—seem to continuously
question the separation on which he himself has insisted. With this change in mind,
I focus on two periods in Vargas Llosa’s career. First, the 1960s and early 1970s,
when The Green House was published and helped solidify his reputation after his
early success, La ciudad y los perros (1962; translated as The Time of the Hero, 1966). At
this point, the representation of nature played a relatively significant role in his
struggle to affirm the ontological independence of literature as a way of grounding
an antimimetic approach associated with the Boom era (Shaw 244). Second, I focus
on the late 1980s and early 1990s, when The Storyteller—one of the most crucial
novels for understanding Vargas Llosa’s views on the Amazon with respect to both
environmental issues and Indigenous rights—was published on the eve of his pres-
idential campaign. During and after his political failure, he continued to reaffirm
the ethical independence of the fictional text, at the same time that his criticism of
both Peru’s historical Indigenism and contemporaneous Indigenous movements
intensified.

Early Essays and the Boom

When the Latin American Boom began taking shape in the mid-1960s, South
American rain forests already enjoyed a space in the region’s novelistic production,
mostly through the genre of “novels of the jungle” produced primarily in the 1920s
and 1930s. One of the Boom authors’ major concerns was to affirm their own rev-
olutionary quality, which heralded the region’s literary maturity. Often, essays by
authors such as Carlos Fuentes and José Donoso marked their work’s distance from
previous waves of regionalist fiction across Spanish America. They attacked what
they saw as the naive, imitative gestures of these genres, much as they mocked the
threatening central role nature played in them. Such arguments suggested that
acritical imitation was tightly linked with using the environment as a structuring
principle of narration.
Besides having published three long, major novels in the 1960s, Vargas Llosa, as
an active essayist and speaker, participated in these discussions as he helped shape
a certain view of the “new Spanish American novel.” Among his early essays on
the topic, “Novela primitiva y novela de creación en América Latina” (1969; “The
Primitive Novel and the Novel of Creation in Latin America”) treats Latin Amer-
ican nature as an aesthetic problem posed by the Boom authors in response to
previous regionalist fiction.3 The documentary dimension of the novels he calls
“primitive,” as well as their social critique and apparent lack of concern for form,

3
The essay was also published by Marcha in 1969, and under the title “En torno a la nueva novela
latinoamericana” by Rı́o Piedras: Revista de la Facultad de Humanidades in 1972.

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were targets for Vargas Llosa’s attack. He concludes that “the principal conflict that
nearly all these novels illustrate is . . . that between man and nature” (“Novela
primitiva” 30).
The shift from the primitive novel to the new one reflects a reversal in this
balance: “In the primitive novel, nature not only annihilated man; it also generated
him. Now it is the reverse; the axis of fiction has rotated from nature to man” (31).
What is specific to the “novel of creation,” we may conclude, is what could be called
an amalgam of narrative anthropocentrism and an understanding of the novel’s
independence from reality, for which The Green House is a practical example. The
novel “no longer serves reality, now it is served by reality,” Vargas Llosa writes
(31).4 For example, he includes among the “novelists of creation” Alejo Carpentier,
who, thirteen years before The Green House, published another celebrated view of
South American rain forests, Los pasos perdidos (1953; translated as The Lost Steps,
1956). Carpentier divides the Venezuelan rain forest into units corresponding to
stages of human history as understood from a Western perspective. In this, the
approach he takes to representing the Amazonian region is markedly distinct from
the devouring figure of the jungle from the 1920s and 1930s, in spite of the influence
those earlier novelists had on him. It is his technical virtuosity, Vargas Llosa con-
tends, that lends Carpentier’s world its “intrinsic truth” (“Novela primitiva” 35).
Over the course of the essay, however, a confusion emerges in Vargas Llosa’s very
definition of “nature.” It seems, at first, to refer to the sublime natural world of
Romantic imagination,5 but it is surreptitiously transformed into nature as a
physical reality from which fiction must detach itself. This confusion is significant,
as his later work echoes it.
Since Vargas Llosa has been concerned with the relationship between literature
and reality for decades, this essay is but a portion of a larger theorization.6 His main
early theses on the topic underscore the nonconformist role of literature, as he
argued in his famous speech “La literatura es fuego” (“Literature Is Fire”), which he
gave on receipt of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Works such as Garcı́a Márquez: His-
toria de un deicidio (1971; Garcı́a Márquez: History of a Deicide) and La orgı́a perpetua
(1975; translated as The Perpetual Orgy, 1986) present his theory of inner demons the
writer has to face in order to write and characterize certain fictional works as “total
novels” that supplant the reality created by God. As he puts it, “One Hundred Years
of Solitude is total novel above all else because it puts into practice the utopian plan

4
The author continued to hold this opinion throughout his life. In his memoir El pez en el agua
(1993; translated as A Fish in the Water, 1994), for example, he reaffirms his dislike for early
twentieth-century regionalist novels (295), and in a conversation at the University of Chicago in
April 2017, he confirmed to me that this remains his view on the subject.
5
In his early theorization of the sublime, Edmund Burke emphasized the danger and incom-
mensurability of nature while keeping the spectator safe from it. By identifying the ideological
component of what was from early on presented as a “universal” phenomenon, Kate Soper
draws attention to the fact that in Burke’s and Kant’s theories of the sublime, “the explanation of
our awe of nature draws on the idea of an inherent human mastery or transcendence of it”
(230).
6
For studies of Vargas Llosa’s theorizations of the novel in this early period and in connection
with subsequent ones, see Blas Matamoro; Belén Castañeda; and Gesine Müller.

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of every supplanter of God: to describe a total reality, to face the real reality with an
image that is its expression and negation” (Garcı́a Márquez 480).7 In this radical
insistence on the ontological independence of the literary text, Vargas Llosa argues
that particular novels, though not all literature, may reach the status of total novels.
If for Vargas Llosa the novel as a genre represents a means of rebelling against
the harshness of reality by creating an alternative world, such autonomy does not
imply an abandonment of realist aesthetics, nor does Vargas Llosa feel less com-
pelled to incorporate factual pieces of information gathered through archival
research, travels, and personal experience into his narratives. As Mark Anderson
explains, “In order for this dialectical confrontation [between fiction and reality] to
occur, . . . the fictional world must seem real, not symbolic: thus, the importance for
Vargas Llosa of using realist modes of representation” (206).
Interestingly, from his early writings on, Vargas Llosa has linked the creation of
alternative realities with historical moments of crisis and hopelessness in which
societies are on the verge of disappearance. In the essay “La novela” (1974; “The
Novel”), for example, he writes: “It is as if from the social and historical point of
view the same thing happened, as if the novels arose in order to recover, to save, to
rescue from nothing those realities that are going to die, that are going to disappear,
that are going to change, to rescue them and also to exorcise them” (40). If echoes of
Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel can be heard in this description of fiction as the
expression of a disintegrating world that has lost its immanent relationship to life, it
also treats the novel as a means of conserving a world, even if in a nontangible
dimension. Accepting Vargas Llosa’s argument that novels arise and become
mature when a society faces the prospect of deep crisis and disappearance, fiction
then transcends its rebellious character to effectively offer some image of totality—
the lost totality of the epic perhaps—that might, to a certain extent, compensate for
a broken reality and, even, exorcise it. Rather than an ability to change reality, this
exorcising function suggests a purging of the trauma of loss and a transformation of
past realities. In a way, this approach parallels what environmental conservation
projects often aim to do on a spatial axis: erase the sense of change by attempting to
keep certain areas as they were before they were engulfed by modernization. “La
novela” fundamentally addresses the rise of the novel in the West and its recent
developments in Latin America and thus does not mention the possible role of
fiction as conservation in the context of the changing world of the Amazon and its
Indigenous peoples. After his travels to the region in 1958 and 1965, he did express
some concern about the impact of the Catholic Church and the Summer Linguistic
Institute on Indigenous peoples, but he did not make explicit the function of stories,
oral or written, in these contexts.
Although Vargas Llosa’s theses on fiction were never completely consistent
and evolved over the decades, in this early period his ideas already suggest how

7
All of these works point out the constitutive dilemma of his ideas on the role of literature
synthesized by Kristal in the following terms: “[I]f literature is autonomous it need not con-
tribute to socialist causes, but if it has to contribute to socialist causes it is not autonomous” (24).
See Ángel Rama and Vargas Llosa for further debate on these issues in the Uruguayan peri-
odical Marcha in 1972 and published in book in 1974.

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environmental mimesis takes shape in his work: one way is through a relativization
of nature as the overwhelming force it was portrayed to be in early twentieth-
century regionalism; and another is through an understanding of the novel as cre-
ating an independent, self-sufficient reality that performs a compensatory function
with regard to a world in crisis. If Idelber Avelar understood the celebratory tone of
the Boom’s fiction as way of compensating “not only for social underdevelopment
but also for the loss of the auratic status of the literary object” (31), another com-
pensatory structure appears here. Vargas Llosa’s desire for a Latin American novel
simultaneously understood as modern and foundational—that is, with its auratic
status reaffirmed—coexists with his fascination with an Amazonian jungle whose
alterity in relation to national modernity is repeatedly declared. In other words, the
framing of the Amazon as “a world that was adventure” legitimizes its conserva-
tion in fiction while minimizing the impact of the numerous transformations it
underwent in real life.

The Green House

Rather than being centered on an urban setting, such as the Lima of both Vargas
Llosa’s first novel and a subsequent one—Conversación en La Catedral (1969; trans-
lated as Conversation in The Cathedral, 1974)—The Green House unfolds over a much
broader geographic and environmental span that, in some senses, evokes earlier
pieces of regionalist fiction that he classified as primitive novels. As this section
shows, the novel aims to create a new form of Latin American realism freed from
the representational constraints of this earlier fiction. Its numerous plots and
subplots take place either in the Amazonian jungle (especially the small Catholic
mission town of Santa Marı́a de Nieva but also with important scenes on islands
and in other localities) or in Piura, a city in the desert on the northern coast of Peru
where the brothel known as the Green House, which lends the book its name, was
built. The novel is set during the decline of rubber tapping extraction in the
Amazon and Piura’s gradual urban growth.8 As such, the formal structure of The
Green House, with interwoven plots narrated in a nonlinear fashion, is a departure
from The Time of the Hero and advances techniques that ultimately became Vargas
Llosa’s trademarks, such as its polyphonically enlaced dialogues.9
The role of nature in these plots, in which the forest is no longer a force “that
replaces and destroys man,” is a telling example of how a novel of creation can be
set in the jungle without being a “novel of the jungle.” Both the Amazon and the
sandy area around Piura present a degree of quick changeability and interference

8
In her analysis of the novel’s previous versions, Rogers concludes: “In the finished novel, Vargas
Llosa’s narrative technique evolves from one of overt exposition of specific historical and
geographical entities to allusive references to vague peoples and places” (Mourning El Dorado
141). Hence the difficulty in establishing clear-cut temporal and institutional reference points, in
spite of overt mentions, for example, of the Instituto Lingüı́stico de Verano that is even more
prominent in The Storyteller.
9
For a study of how Vargas Llosa reconciles realist prose with a fragmented structure in the
context of the 1960s, see Jorge Bracamonte.

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with human affairs that at some points seems to wink parodically at the reader
familiar with the corpus of “primitive” regionalist fiction. At the beginning of the
novel the character Aquilino notes, “People who make maps don’t know that the
Amazon is like a hot woman, she’s never the same. Everything is on the move here,
the rivers, the animals, the trees” (41). The building of Casa Verde is initially met
with skepticism from those who believe that “[t]he sand would eat the house up in
no time, it would swallow it up like the old rotten trees and the dead vultures” (67).
The idea of a nature that swallows human structures—especially linked with the
verb tragar, or “to eat up,” famously used in the last sentence of José Eustasio
Rivera’s emblematic “novel of the jungle,” La vorágine (1924; translated as The
Vortex, 2003)—clearly alludes to the novelistic trend that perhaps most typifies the
“primitive novel.” And this is not its only occurrence. For example, the character
Sergeant Delgado makes a Riveran observation about a small village: “The jungle’s
practically swallowed up these huts already” (238). Following Rogers (“Mario
Vargas Llosa and the Novela de la Selva”), who has identified an intense dialogue
between Vargas Llosa’s jungle novels and the genre of “novels of the jungle,”10
I contend that The Green House shows precisely how Vargas Llosa’s “novels of cre-
ation” differ from a “primitive novel” while reiterating its tropes.
Descriptions of the rain forest in The Green House are perfunctory in comparison
to the “novels of the jungle,” and while water and profuse vegetation may affect
human actions, they do not pose an existential threat to the characters. They
present obstacles to locomotion—“That’s the way the jungle is, you have to be
patient,” says Delgado (264)—but, with notable exceptions, do not become iden-
tifiable antagonists. In a sign of its departure from the Romantic sublime, the
novel’s descriptions of the jungle often do not take place through the characters’
gazes but rather through tangible perceptions of the forest as it interacts with the
human body, thus turning the locus of attention away from the forest and toward its
human inhabitants.11 For example, when Fushı́a and Lalita run away into the wild:
“They were escorted by gnats, a rain of mosquitoes, the hoarse song of the trom-
petero birds, and at night, in spite of the fire and the blankets, the bats would swoop
over their bodies and bite into the soft spots” (198–99). The Green House was pri-
marily understood by its author and received by its critics in the context of the
Boom’s innovations, to the point that Gerald Martin, in 1989, called it “one of the
greatest novels to have emerged from Latin America” (212).12 That nature was no
longer a protagonist and that instead an anthropocentric approach was achieved by

10
As Raymond L. Williams proposes, “This jungle, however, is not the wild and uncontrolled
vortex (or vorágine) of the criollista texts, in which human beings are devoured in an irrational
chaos. Rather, it is a nature that Vargas Llosa constructs in the neutral mode of scientific
discourse” (“Natural and Built Environments” 59).
11
Ariel Dorfman notes that “nature . . . almost disappears in Vargas Llosa, even when half of The
Green House occurs in the jungle, the jungle is like a green house, like a green city” (142).
12
Similarly, Julio Cortázar said in a letter that “the stupendous thing about the book . . . is that the
description of nature, which is fundamental in the novel, is in that way fused with the action, so
that one never realizes that you are showing to the reader what a clearing in the forest, a curve
of the river, a street in the city is like” (Letras Libres).

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emphasizing the jungle’s effects on the human body is among the elements that
make up what the Boom-era authors would call a “mature Latin American novel”
with human characters taking the lead.
Vargas Llosa learned some decisive lessons while composing The Green House, as
shown in the essay Historia secreta de una novela (Secret History of a Novel), published
in 1971—the same year as Garcı́a Márquez: Historia de un deicidio.13 Historia secreta
narrates the autobiographical events—including two stints each in Piura and the
Amazon during his childhood and young adulthood—that most influenced the
settings of The Green House, followed by an account of how he wrote the book. It
makes clear how aware Vargas Llosa was of avoiding the pitfalls he had identified
a couple of years before. Living in Paris at the time of the novel’s composition
and consulting bibliographies on the region as well as visiting botanical gar-
dens, he declares that “the Amazonian readings vaccinated me against the vice of
description” (66). In other words, his novel’s very thematic affinity with the novels
of the jungle and colonial chronicles, and his close study of them, prevented him
from yielding to the documentary impulse and, we might add, from allowing the
forest to predominate over human characters. This explains why in The Green
House, as in some of his later novels, the descriptions of the Amazon are brief,
perhaps crude, and never really similar to those of either colonial chronicles or the
novelas de la selva, in spite of a shared setting and notwithstanding the dialogue
Vargas Llosa establishes with those genres. These descriptions are not based on the
detached eye contemplating the forest but on constant interactions between humans
and nature, in which smell, heat, discomfort, and insects come to the fore.
More than that, Historia secreta is a key document showing how many of the
tropes of and declarations about Indigenous peoples that became explosive in
Vargas Llosa’s work in the late 1980s and 1990s were already present, sometimes
almost in the same words, in this earlier period. After his first, decisive trip to the
region, he notes, “I discovered a face of my country that had been completely
unknown to me. . . . There I discovered that Peru was not only a country of the
twentieth century, with abundant problems, of course . . . , but that Peru was also the
Middle Ages and the Stone Age” (29). He later maintained this view of the forest as
part of an earlier temporality defined in relation to a Eurocentric historiography,
especially in his speeches and articles as a politician and public intellectual.14 In
fact, passages like the one above call into question any assumption that Vargas
Llosa’s ethnocentrism with respect to Latin American Indigenous populations was
a byproduct of his ideological conversion from socialism to neoliberalism in the
1970s. Although less obviously, such opinions were already present in 1971.
Regarding the opening scene of The Green House, Vargas Llosa notes in Historia
secreta that he does not approve of the forced acculturation of Indigenous girls by
nuns, which only enables their precarious insertion into and exploitation by non-

13
For an overview of The Green House’s paratexts, see Luys A. Dı́ez.
14
As Marı́a de las Mercedes Ortiz Rodrı́guez explains, “The writer uses here an idea that the
anthropologist Johannes Fabian has developed as the concept of ‘denial of coevalness,’ a ten-
dency through which anthropology has permitted itself to place the cultures it studies in a time
distinct from the present of the researcher, thereby conceiving them as ‘primitive’” (118).

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Indigenous societies later on. He also asserts that he does not idealize the living
conditions of Indigenous groups, unlike anthropologists such as Mascarita, in his
1980s novel, who “wanted to conserve at all costs, faithfully intact, the ‘prehistoric’
life of the tribes in order to . . . ‘study them better’” (34–35). Passages such as this
show that themes already implicit in The Green House cross Vargas Llosa’s work and
thought over decades and that the history of this novel’s reception, which cele-
brated it as a triumph of the “new novel” as well as a means for accessing an
unknown Peru, missed some important points that later took on more problematic
contours with the author’s harsh criticism of both Peruvian Indigenist thought and
various Indigenous traditions in other parts of Latin America.
In its thematic and geographic breadth as well as in its stylistic choices, such
as nonlinear, entangled plots and overlapping dialogue, The Green House aspires to
be a “total novel.” At the same time, while the understanding of fiction as con-
servation is not yet present in Vargas Llosa’s thinking, the ethical independence of
fictional discourse that he would explore more deeply in the 1980s already appears
in Historia secreta: “‘The real truth’ is one thing and the ‘literary truth’ is another,
and there is nothing as difficult as wanting both to coincide” (69), he says toward
the end of the book. As such, the threads weaving together Vargas Llosa’s views of
fiction in these two periods were already evident and persisted across later decades,
as the predicament of Amazonian Indigenous peoples and environments became
more publicly urgent.

The Storyteller

Vargas Llosa’s third novel set in the Amazon shares neither the multiple plots
and formal complexity of The Green House nor the comic style of Pantaleón y las
visitadoras (1973; translated as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978). Instead,
it emphasizes, via an intensely dialogic structure, fundamental dilemmas about
whether and how to integrate Indigenous populations—especially groups with
little to no contact with outsiders—into the nation. Involved in these debates is the
management of the Amazon’s natural resources and the impending threat of
deforestation.
The two protagonists take two diverging views on these subjects. The first-
person narrator defends the assimilation of Peruvian Indians as a process that is
not only inevitable but actually good for them. I call this narrator Mario because of
his biographical similarities with Vargas Llosa and to differentiate him from the
other narrator, the eponymous storyteller.15 The similarities between Mario’s and

15
In calling the narrator Mario, I follow Doris Sommer. Among the similarities is Vargas Llosa’s
trip to the Amazon in 1958 on an expedition organized by the Instituto Lingüı́stico de Verano,
which Mario’s trip echoes. Vargas Llosa, nevertheless, challenges the characterization of this
novel as a “disguised autobiography” in an interview with Ricardo A. Setti where he describes
it as “a fiction in which there are also some autobiographical elements integrated with elements
from the imagination” (Setti and Vargas Llosa 72). Vargas Llosa’s strong affirmation of fictional
autonomy notwithstanding, this is but one more example of the autobiographical specter
present in many of his novels. From his 1960s novels to his later fiction, the author has often

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Vargas Llosa’s most polemical opinions, in fact, constitute one of the reasons that
debates about this novel have been so contentious. Mario’s school friend Saúl
Zuratas, a promising Jewish anthropology student working with one of the most
isolated groups in the Amazon, the Machiguenga, challenges his views. As Zuratas
grows progressively disappointed with the work of anthropologists and their
influence on these communities, he abandons his studies, and the narrator loses
track of him. But he has reason to believe that Zuratas went to live among the
Machiguenga and became one of the most cherished and protected figures in their
culture: an hablador, or person who travels among the scattered members of the
nomadic group telling stories. Albeit translated into English as “storyteller,” the
term hablador refers more precisely to a “talker,” the negative connotations of which
suggest a careless character, prone to gossiping, lying, and idle chatter. The term is
clearly gendered: women are more often perceived as habladoras. This ambiguity
inflects a figure whom the narrator nevertheless defines in a serious tone as “the
memory of the community” (Storyteller 93) and “the connecting links of this society
that the fight for survival had forced to split up and scatter to the four winds” (92);
habladores are those who conserve shared cultural knowledge and pass it along
among the Machiguenga.16
The chapters alternate between recounting the plot above and a series of shifting
narratives about the Machiguenga mythical figure Tasurinchi, until it ultimately
becomes clear in the last chapter that Zuratas, the storyteller, is telling these stories
and mixing Western Jewish allusions into them, such as references to Franz Kafka’s
protagonist Gregor Samsa and to Jesus Christ. It also becomes clear in the epilogue
that after seeing a photograph of an hablador with a large birthmark like Zuratas’s,
Mario decides to consider Zuratas an hablador, which retrospectively inserts the
Machiguenga stories into Mario’s own attempt at writing about them.17
Unlike the case of the Jewish diaspora, however, the ultimate threat to the
Machiguenga’s integrity emerges from the economic exploitation of Amazonian
natural resources: rubber extraction, or “bleeding of the trees” in the relatively
recent past; the remnants of the oil industry; drug trafficking; and the expansion of
the agricultural frontier. The novel is in part nostalgic about the Machiguenga—
who had piqued Vargas Llosa’s interest since he first learned of them on his early
trip to the Amazon, which he described in an affectionate way—even as it evokes a
certain “imperialist nostalgia,” in Renato Rosaldo’s term, which Misha Kokotovic

included identifiable pieces of information drawn from his own life, even when these details are
attributed to characters quite different from himself. In numerous essays across his career,
Vargas Llosa has noted, questioned, and discussed this autobiographical dimension of his work,
or the “inverted strip-tease” (Historia secreta 12) through which he uses personal experiences
and disguises them in his characters’ lives. In El hablador, however, the similarities between the
author and the protagonist appear particularly acute.
16
As Emil Volek notes, “Just as Tasurinchi creates the world . . . the novelist-god also creates,
through the gift of the word, complex fictitious worlds” (111–12).
17
Hedy Habra sees photography as the element connecting the separate worlds of each of the two
narrators.

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uses to describe both Vargas Llosa’s and the narrator’s attitudes (Rosaldo qtd. in
Kokotovic 463).18 Despite this nostalgia, the narrator states:

What did he suggest, when all was said and done? That, in order not to change the
way of life and the beliefs of a handful of tribes still living, many of them, in the Stone
Age, the rest of Peru abstain from developing the Amazon region? Should sixteen
million Peruvians renounce the natural resources of three-quarters of the national
territory so that seventy or eighty thousand Indians could quietly go on shooting at
each other with bows and arrows . . . ? . . . No, Mascarita, the country had to move
forward. . . . If the price to be paid for development and industrialization for the
sixteen million Peruvians meant that those few thousand naked Indians would have
to cut their hair, wash off their tattoos, and become mestizos—or, to use the ethnol-
ogists’ most detested word, become acculturated—well, there was no way round it.
(Storyteller 21–22)

Not by chance has this passage been frequently recalled in critical pieces on the
novel. It condenses in a few sentences decades of Vargas Llosa’s thought, now
transferred to Mario, about how Amazonian Indigenous communities live in noth-
ing short of a Stone Age and their picturesque lifestyle must necessarily be dis-
rupted, in spite of the good intentions of inherently misguided anthropologists and
activists, in order to clear the way for development. From an environmental per-
spective, the passage implies that the motive is ultimately not to acculturate Indi-
genous peoples per se but rather to exploit the region. Although Vargas Llosa
became even more emphatic in his later defenses of acculturation as a way to build a
modern Peru, this passage, clear and concise, could be read as a self-parody of his
own views, besides showing how similar Mario’s opinions about environmental
policies are to the author’s. Yet the fictional status of Mario’s words is instrumental
in the narrative structure of The Storyteller.
If the similarities between Vargas Llosa and the narrator abound, so too do
allusions to Peruvian novelist José Marı́a Arguedas via the figure of Zuratas—an
analogy complicated by the way the novel displaces Arguedas’s Andean Indigenist
thought to the context of the Amazon. The relationship between Mario and Zuratas
resonates with the intellectual stance Vargas Llosa took with regard to Arguedas
and, to a certain extent, the whole Indigenist tradition of which the latter is a part. In
his La utopı́a arcaica: José Marı́a Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo (1996; The
Archaic Utopia: José Marı́a Arguedas and the Fictions of Indigenism), Vargas Llosa
harshly criticizes Arguedas for his supposedly idealized portrayal of the Andean
region’s Indigenous groups, accusing him of being a “cultural ecologist” (37).
Arguedas’s “archaic utopia,” Vargas Llosa contends, should only be fully expressed
through worlds constructed in fiction, not given any space in extrafictional strug-
gles. It is, in sum, a perverse reaffirmation of fiction’s ability to conserve past

18
Kokotovic describes this type of nostalgia as “the yearning felt by moderns for the vanished
(and vanquished) cultures whose destruction was deemed a necessary and inevitable conse-
quence of modernization” (463). See Véronique Bragard and Geneviève Fabry for a less critical
approach to the “nostalgic rational and written frame of the novel” (473).

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realities, which Vargas Llosa defended in earlier pieces. While Zuratas is so similar
to Arguedas that the narrator characterizes the latter’s worldview as an “archaic,
anti-historical utopia” (Storyteller 78), he thinks that the situation of Indigenous
peoples in the Andes, and therefore the Indigenist tradition in Peru, fundamen-
tally diverges from that of Indigenous groups in Amazonia. In Zuratas’s words,

No, I’m not an Indigenist like the ones of the thirties. . . . I know very well that
there’s no turning back for the descendants of the Incas. The only course left them is
integration. . . . I’m not being utopian. But in Amazonia it’s different. The great
trauma that turned the Incas into a people of sleepwalkers and vassals hasn’t yet
occurred there. . . . We know now what an atrocity bringing progress, trying to
modernize a primitive people, is. Quite simply, it wipes them out. (99–100)

Passages like this one reveal a crucial rift between a defense of Amazonian
Indians based on Andean Indigenism and the specificity of their situation: while
Indians from the Andes must acculturate themselves, Indians from the Amazon
can still be shielded from modernizing forces. This passage, in fact, calls into
question the inevitable temptation, present in criticism of The Storyteller, to read
Zuratas’s position exclusively through the lens of Andean Indigenism, at least as
Vargas Llosa described it. The identification of Zuratas with Arguedas and Andean
Indigenism is unavoidable yet imprecise.
A point of similarity between the real Arguedas and the fictional Zuratas, how-
ever, is the continuum between humanity and nature in their thought. Previous
critical work on Arguedas, such as that of William Rowe,19 identified this harmony,
and Vargas Llosa reaffirmed it in La utopı́a arcaica, in spite of moments in Arguedas’s
fiction that disrupt it in states of ecological crisis, as Jorge Marcone (“Recuperar
Chimbote”) notes. Zuratas, interestingly, uses this idea to justify the uniqueness of
Amazonian Indians: “The relationship between man and Nature, for instance. . . . We
don’t even know what the harmony that exists between man and those things can be,
since we’ve shattered it forever” (Storyteller 100). As such, Zuratas suggests that
environmental conservation in the Amazon could enable the conservation of cul-
tural forms and modes of existence already condemned to destruction in the Andes.
Vargas Llosa’s own opinions on environmental conservation are similarly
bifurcated. From his leftist position in the 1960s, he shifted toward neoliberalism in
the 1970s, embraced it more thoroughly in the 1980s, and expressed it fully in his
1990 candidacy for Peru’s presidency via his ardent defense of privatizing state
companies. Vargas Llosa advocated “a system in which everyone could have access
to the market, to owing and running a business, and to private property” (Fish in the
Water chap. 18) in essays as well as in his presidential campaign.20 In his work as a

19
According to Rowe, the relationship between humans and nonhumans in Arguedas’s work is
“essentially reciprocal: man is viewed in terms of nature, and nature is viewed in terms of
man” (88).
20
For an overview of Vargas Llosa’s political and intellectual trajectory in the 1970s and 1980s
leading up to his positions during the election, see Kristal, chaps. 3 and 4. For a rather critical
account of his increasing involvement in Peru’s political life in the 1980s, see Mirko Lauer.

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public intellectual, he promoted exploiting rather than conserving natural resources

and stood firmly for acculturation, which he repeatedly portrayed as inevitable in
widely read and translated essays such as “Questions of Conquest” (1990). While
his fierce defense of private property often clashed with the views of Indigenous
leaders, he was curiously not averse to reforestation, at least in areas deforested by
narcotrafficking. He proposed it in a speech given at the Agricultural and Eco-
nomic Forum on January 30, 1990. Moreover, an organ of his own campaign, the
Commission for the Environment and Sustainable Development, formulated a set
of ambitious initiatives to advance the then increasingly popular concept of sus-
tainable development. Their plan “to work closely with Native Communities”
(“Resumen de los programas” 2) indeed seemed at odds with Vargas Llosa’s own
essays. A comparison between the politician and the public intellectual, conse-
quently, reveals a far more ambivalent attitude than the one articulated in his
nonfiction—an ambivalence that finds its fictional manifestation in The Storyteller.
The novel’s reception was shaped not only by Vargas Llosa’s own political
stances but also by significant transformations from the 1960s to the 1980s,21 when
the Peruvian Amazon was increasingly integrated into international circuits of
capitalism in what Macarena Gómez-Barris has called “the extractive zone.”22
Rural and forest workers in the Brazilian Amazon led a number of grassroots
movements that were part of what Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martı́nez Alier call
the “environmentalism of the poor” (11). These environmental activists were
brutally repressed, with rubber tapper and environmental leader Chico Mendes
and others murdered by local landowners and extractive companies. According to
Óscar Espinosa de Rivero, in the Peruvian Amazon such movements, alongside
development projects that successive governments promoted, inspired the crea-
tion of the first Indigenous organizations dedicated to fighting for their territory
and their culture. This process began with the Shuar Federation, founded in 1964
in response to an Indigenous massacre, and culminated with the establishment,
in 1981, of the Interethnic Association of Development of the Peruvian Amazon
(AIDESEP), “which represents, on a national level, the interests of the majority of
Amazonian indigenous peoples” (Espinosa de Rivero 145).
Simultaneously, the 1980s saw the publication of literary works that gave Indi-
genous voices almost unprecedented attention. On the Peruvian Amazon, César
Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo (1981; The Three Halves of Ino Moxo), a book
based on interviews with shaman Ino Moxo, immerses readers into what Jorge
Marcone (“Ecologı́a de un sueño”) calls “not only a representation of ayahuasca’s
mestizo shamanism, but a being of this very [Amazonian] cosmology” (330).
Beyond Peru, in a volume published in Brazil—Antes o mundo não existia (1980; At

21
Despite the author’s polemical stances, the Amazon jungle and its inhabitants featured in The
Storyteller were “topics of special interest to readers who are becoming increasingly aware of
ecological concerns as well as the plight of ethnic minorities whose needs conflict with per-
ceived national interests” (O’Bryan-Knight 75).
22
Extractive zones are “what is submerged within local geographies that have been traversed by
colonialism and extractive capitalism to show the ongoing force of the colonial encounter”
(Gómez-Barris 2).

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That Time the World Did Not Exist)—Umusi Pãrõkumu and Tõrãmu Kehı́ri narrate
the mythology of the Desana-Kehı́ripõrã for a non-Indigenous audience. Therefore,
while the reception of The Green House emphasized the technical virtuosity of its
representation of an “unknown Peru” that existed “in the Stone Age,” such depic-
tions were now associated with a series of pressing political issues and new rep-
resentational possibilities that The Storyteller, in fact, dramatized.
In this context, it is not surprising that a work as close to a novel of ideas as The
Storyteller, with its crucial discussion of possible futures for Amazonian Indigenous
populations and the physical environments where they lived, moved critical dis-
cussion about Vargas Llosa’s environmental representation from a mostly aesthetic
plane to a broadly political and ethical one. What was at stake was not so much the
possibility of formal innovation as the forests and peoples Vargas Llosa himself
admired, disturbingly portrayed alongside an argument for cultural assimilation,
deforestation, and urbanization. At a time when Vargas Llosa’s literary persona
was deeply attached to his role as a politician, the identification between The
Storyteller’s author and its narrator became especially significant.23 Scholars have
undertaken the task of understanding how this novel may have functioned rhe-
torically as part of Vargas Llosa’s political agenda at the time,24 even while a
straightforward identification of Vargas Llosa the author with Vargas Llosa the
politician and public intellectual remains, as many of these works show, difficult.
Part of the problem is that the narrator identified with the author tells only half of
the story, quite literally.
Roughly half of The Storyteller is devoted to narrating the legends, stories, and
sometimes self-assessments of the Machiguenga, among whom discourses of defor-
estation and cultural assimilation are absent. While criticism of the novel has ten-
ded to emphasize the chapters in which the author’s alter ego speaks, critics who
focus on the Machiguenga, such as Sá, have shown discrepancies between Vargas
Llosa’s representation of the group and aspects of their referential reality—the most
important of which is that the figure of the hablador does not exist among the real
Machiguenga (271). In the novel itself, perhaps the major obstacle to identifying the
fictional hablador with a hypothetical Indigenous figure is the revelation, toward
the end of the book, that Zuratas is one of the habladores. This revelation takes
place via an allusion to Jesus Christ so obvious that it could easily be considered a
technical flaw in an otherwise brilliant writer, and that factor, for this same reason,
makes the Western hablador’s intrusion clear enough that it unmistakably signals
the writer’s limitations in emulating an Indigenous voice. In this unresolved state,

23
For a study of the complicated dynamics between Vargas Llosa’s fictional and nonfictional work
with respect to Indigenous issues, see López-Calvo.
24
José Castro Urioste shows how the Indigenous voice, even in Zuratas’s chapters, is erased by the
use of “ventriloquized narrative” (246). Kokotovic reads the novel as a continuation of Vargas
Llosa’s clear defense of cultural assimilation in the essay “El nacimiento del Perú” (1986) and its
variants. Sergio Franco metonymically connects the silence of photographs of the Machiguenga
shown at an exhibition in Florence with the “silence of the native that dwells in the neocolonial
unconscious of El hablador” (585). See also the passage by Castro-Klarén quoted in the next
section.

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Sommer argues, “whatever rush toward modernity may be moving the plot and
pushing Vargas Llosa’s political pronouncements, . . . the novel performs a parity of
attention span between tradition and modernity” (101).
This performance of a dual voice thus conflicts with the broader reception
context in which the novel came out. Richard Walsh proposes three spheres in
which narrative voice unfolds: one is instance, or the broader task of narration or
diegesis through which this voice constitutes “a representational act, not just a
verbal one” (89); the second is idiom, which refers to discourses represented within
the narration or mimetic voices in a Platonic sense, that is, the voices of characters
in a dialogue, for example (93); and the third is interpellation, which, borrowed
from Louis Althusser, encompasses the ideological dimension of “double-voiced”
discourses (100). This third dimension, which can pervade both of the other two
spheres, involves readers’ ability to imaginatively align themselves with the subject
position of the discourse (98). The positions of Mario, Zuratas, and the hablador(es)
are clearly visible in the case of their idioms, yet there is no clear position on the
level of instance. What is the ideological dimension of the novel as a representa-
tional act? Should it simply be equated with the positions Vargas Llosa has taken in
other realms of intellectual activity, or should it include the ideological fissures
implied by the double structure of alternating narrations (i.e., Mario’s chapters and
the hablador’s chapters)?
The novel’s overall shape indeed converges to give Mario’s narration promi-
nence, which is confirmed by Vargas Llosa’s inability to fully represent an Indi-
genous voice. But the intense, conflicted dialogism the novel stages cannot be
resolved by framing it in the author’s broader rhetoric as a politician and public
intellectual, for the very representational act of giving the hablador and Zuratas
voices in the novel challenges this straightforward correspondence.25 In this sense,
the whole novel is permeated by a double-voiced discourse that constantly con-
nects to Vargas Llosa’s positions in the extraliterary domain, while ideological
ambivalence is kept on the level of idiom—the discussions between the narrator
and Zuratas, for example—and in the rotation of narrative voice among the nar-
rator, Zuratas, and the hablador. In other words, the complexity of The Storyteller is
such that the discourses inside the novel continuously undermine its ideological
undertones. Being “contingent and inherently protean in its rhetorical emphasis
and focus, direction and misdirection” (Walsh 93), this narrative instantiation
excludes any systematic equivalence between the narrator and Vargas Llosa, as the
assumed ideological background of the novel is unsettled by the voices that
compose its idioms.
When it comes to an ethics of fiction, thus, The Storyteller offers an example of
how, in James Phelan’s words, “the technical choices of the narrative entail ethi-
cal consequences” (23). The different ethical situations stemming from the posi-
tion in which readers are placed in a novel marked by a double-voiced discourse

25
I agree with Yvon Grenier and Marteen Van Delden that “within his [Vargas Llosa’s] literary
work—undoubtedly more so than in his political essays—these categories are fluid and
opposites are reconciled and reemerge as coincidencia oppositorum” (214).

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simultaneously seem to demand an ethical response and keep readers in an

uncomfortably unresolved zone that is comparable, I contend, to the discomfort
Phelan identifies in the blend of horror and sympathy implied by the dual focal-
ization of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (Phelan 130–31).
The consequent puzzle, for the purposes of this article, is whether the envi-
ronmental defense that Zuratas and Tasurinchi articulate results in the novel itself
suggesting any form of ethical commitment with regard to deforestation in the
Amazon—and whether this commitment stems from what Suzanne Keen calls an
“empathic inaccuracy” that occurs when “authors evoke empathy unintentionally”
(137). One important element in this equation, which resonates with Vargas Llosa’s
earlier work, is the role of storytelling in conserving Machiguenga worldviews and
traditions by creating a parallel plane on which the disintegrating world of the
Amazon in the mid- to late twentieth century might still find a sense of wholeness
and refuge. This is, as the next section proposes, a key element in understanding
the relation between mimesis and environmentalism in Vargas Llosa’s work of the
late 1980s and 1990s.

Late Essays

Far from being an accident in Vargas Llosa’s fiction, The Storyteller’s lack of reso-
lution reflects a broader set of concerns he expressed in that period.26 As Jorge
Marcone (“El hablador”) contends, “Vargas Llosa finds in the narrative art of the
habladores, for example, the justification for his own ‘poetics’ on fiction and reality”
(138). Indeed, as he became more active as a reporter, public intellectual, and
politician in the late 1980s, Vargas Llosa’s defense of fiction as possessing some
form of unique truth becomes more insistent. Essays of his that evoke the semantic
field of lying when referring to fiction abound: “El arte de mentir” (“The Art of
Lying”), “El poder de la mentira” (“The Power of Lying”), and “La verdad de las
mentiras” (“The Truth of Lies”), for example, are versions of the same text. The last
one, written precisely around the time of the presidential campaign in 1989 and the
title essay in a book published in 1990, proposes that the truth of fiction is not to be
measured by its adherence to referential reality but rather by its ability to create a
fictional reality: “The novel is, then, an amoral genre, or, better, of a sui generis
ethical stance, for which truth or lies are exclusively aesthetic concepts” (10). Fic-
tion thus provides a richer life than reality—“because real life . . . has never been nor
will ever be enough to fulfill human desires” (19). One might almost interpret this
essay as an indirect response to the dilemma of The Storyteller. If, as Castro-Klarén
notes of the novel, “the autonomous existence of indigenous cultures is now an idea
to be debated in the fictional and fictionalizing space of novelistic discourse” (47),
this fictionalization can be regarded not as a delegitimation of the past and present
of the Machiguenga and other Indigenous cultures but as an outcome of the

26
Raymond L. Williams proposes, in this sense, that this novel and others published in the period
“represent three approaches to the problem of truth” (Vargas Llosa 253).

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disintegration these cultures will soon face, in Vargas Llosa’s view, and from which
the novel has no option but to ethically disengage itself.27
An overview of Vargas Llosa’s positions on fiction in these two periods of his
career thus reveals a myriad of varied yet interconnected perspectives. In the first
phase—the 1960s and 1970s—he is fundamentally concerned with the ontological
independence of fictional works from reality, conceiving the very act of writing as a
rebellion against that same reality. Alongside the Boom authors’ shared socialist
inclinations, the Boom narrative was then seen as a project of aesthetic innovation
in reaction to the “naive realism” of “primitive novels.” What Vargas Llosa called
“novels of creation,” which include but are not limited to those of the Boom, do
not submit to an imitative notion of mimesis but aim to create worlds of their own.
The documentary component of his “creative” realist aesthetics, therefore, was
supposed to enhance, not diminish, a literary work’s autonomy and its potentially
transformative capacity. This capacity may at times lead to the work’s power of
subversion, a notion that might accommodate, for example, the defense of prose
fiction’s social commitment that Jean-Paul Sartre professes in What Is Literature? In
this first phase, the representation of the Amazon in The Green House does fulfill
documentary criteria insofar as it foregrounds elements of the jungle unknown to
a large portion of its readers while also enjoying a critical reception focused on
its formal innovations—namely, its multifaceted structure with full use of Vargas
Llosa’s signature technique of interlaced dialogue.28
By contrast, the second phase, from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, is marked
by a more troubled relationship between Vargas Llosa’s fictional works and his
extraliterary activities. Public perception of him as a champion of right-wing pol-
itics and his contested conclusions in the Uchuraccay case increasingly raised
suspicions about his views on Indigenous peoples in Peru, in both the Andean and
Amazonian regions, which only worsened in the 1990s and the 2000s.29 Concurrent
with these increased tensions, his essays on literature seemed to signal another
version of his 1960s theorizations, reaffirming the independence of literary texts
not so much in ontological as in ethical terms.
In spite of this argument’s clear importance as a response to those who used his
fictional texts to question his political abilities during the campaign, such a sepa-
ration is complicated by the very fact that his novels from the period, such as

27
As Kristal notes, the essay combines the influence of Georges Bataille with that of Karl Popper,
which results in Vargas Llosa’s arguing “that the transgressions of literature can be useful to the
health of an open society if the boundaries between the historical and the fictional are clearly
demarcated” (117).
28
Neil Larsen provides a sharp analysis of what he identifies as a form of narrative metalepsis
that, albeit maintaining the modern form found in Gustave Flaubert, is applied to a context
where the “social relation of public whole to private parts are lacking or withheld” (164).
29
In 1983, Vargas Llosa accepted an invitation from the then-president of Peru, Fernando Belaúnde,
to investigate the deaths of eight journalists and a guide in the Andean region of Uchuraccay.
His “Report on the Uchuraccay” (Castro Arenas, Guzmán Figueroa, and Vargas Llosa) mis-
takenly excused the armed forces’ involvement and blamed local communities for the crime.
According to Fabiola Escárzaga Nicté, Vargas Llosa’s approach shows how a “confusion between
fiction and reality in politics may have consequences [unforeseen in novels]” (227).

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Historia de Mayta (1984; translated as The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1986) and
especially The Storyteller, do deal with a series of nonfictional circumstances with
clear political dimensions. The rhetorical structure of the latter novel, for example,
channels into a tense dialogism a fraught and fractured public debate about Indi-
genous acculturation and environmental conservation in Peru, and does so by
circumventing the Andean context to focus on the somewhat more delicate issue of
the Amazon. Although Vargas Llosa’s alter ego enjoys some degree of predomi-
nance in the novel, both the juxtaposition of his narration with that of the hablador
and his dialogue with Zuratas create the fissures in his arguments identified above.
As such, Vargas Llosa engages intensely with controversial issues in his fiction at
the same time as he dismisses, through his essays, any form of ethical commitment
these same fictions might have with regard to the real dilemmas they portray.
Though his essays by no means subscribe to another version of the subversive quality
of literature—such as, for example, Martha Nussbaum’s argument that novels form
a literary imagination that shapes ethical choices and moral judgments—his novels
of the period seem tailored to enact the type of effect that his essays dismiss.

Conclusion

A comparison between these phases of Vargas Llosa’s career thus shows an

enduring defense of literature as not serving reality, either because it creates its own
reality as a form of deicide or because it remains impervious to notions of truth and
falsehood while, as Moraña proposes, compensating “for the mediocrity of life”
(173).30 The crucial point here is that the creation of such fictional worlds does not
imply a need to protect the realities from which fiction borrows. Vargas Llosa’s
understanding of novels as ways of conserving a disintegrating reality in a time
of crisis, which evolved in the 1960s, takes on a whole new dimension in The
Storyteller. The hablador’s stories are quite explicitly the primary means of con-
serving intact a world on the verge of disappearance due to deforestation and
acculturation—even though Zuratas’s introduction of Western elements creates a
fissure at the heart of the hablador’s function that constitutes one of the novel’s
major postmodern ironies.31 Moreover, the disappearing figure of the hablador and
his stories were to be conserved, albeit imperfectly, in the very text of this typical
product of modernity that is the novel.32

30
In Moraña’s words, “the leitmotiv of this elaboration rests on the capacity of art to compensate
for the mediocrity of life, to express opposition to the real world, and to elevate the perception
of aspects of everyday experience that would otherwise be overlooked by the common man”
(173).
31
Keith Booker argues thus that the failure of the modern novelist is the success of the post-
modern one (137–38).
32
In this sense, Vargas Llosa’s hablador clearly recalls Walter Benjamin’s storyteller via their
shared contrast with the novelist; that is, the storyteller “tells [oral tales] from experience”
(Benjamin 364) as opposed to the isolated novelist whose work appears only in the written
book. Symptomatic of this similar function is the English translation of the two terms with the
same word in spite of the hablador’s connotation of “talker.”

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 SARAMAGO VARGAS LLOSA AND THE AMAZON 37

In this context, I propose that the ethical clash between Zuratas and Mario
mirrors the ethical clash between a committed view of fiction in the 1980s and
Vargas Llosa’s professed position that fiction is independent from any exogenous
notion of truth. When it comes to the environmental realm and the Amazon, this
means that his fiction on the region, regardless of the sense of wonder it might
convey, need not maintain any form of engagement with or responsibility toward
its referential reality. Hence Vargas Llosa’s fascination with the Amazon, which he
has expressed numerous times, can co-exist with his defense of deforestation. His
aesthetic perception of the rain forest seems to have been completely encoded in his
fictional rain forest. This could explain the coexistence, in Vargas Llosa’s work, of
his long-lasting appreciation of the jungle and the many projects and policies he
has defended or proposed that threaten its environmental integrity as well as the
well-being of Indigenous communities living in the area.
To be sure, the problematic character of this disjunction becomes more visible in
the ethical double bind built into The Storyteller’s polyphonic structure. In The Green
House and even in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, deforestation is neither
thematized nor generally perceived as a problem by critics. Something similar
could be said of Indigenous acculturation, even though, in The Green House, Indi-
genous girls are kidnapped to be educated in the Catholic mission of Santa Marı́a
de Nieva. Despite all these factors, in his essays Vargas Llosa maintained the
mimetic independence of fiction, which does not seem to need a truth other than its
own. If we follow this reasoning, the conservation of the forest in the pages of his
novels is dissociated from and markedly independent of the conservation policies
the politician and public intellectual Vargas Llosa advocated for the real Amazon,
even if some components of his own novels continuously question the premises on
which such a notion of conservation in fiction is based.

* * *

victoria saramago is assistant professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies at the

Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She is
author of Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America
(2021) and O duplo do pai: O filho e a ficção de Cristovão Tezza (2013).

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