Mario Vargas Llosa & the Populist Novel

In my obituary for the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who died last year, I cited Fredric Jameson’s controversial 1986 text “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” In this essay, Jameson argued that “third-world texts … necessarily project a political dimension,” such that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.” Whatever the broader defensibility of the thesis, I noted, it is straightforwardly true of Vargas Llosa’s body work, which never ceased to pose the question asked at the beginning of his 1969 novel Conversation in the Cathedral, “¿En qué momento se había jodido el Perú?” (“At what moment had Peru fucked itself up?”) After asking himself this, that novel’s protagonist, Zavalita, reflects that he is “like Peru” because “he fucked himself up somewhere along the line.” Vargas Llosa’s epigraph, from Balzac, also anticipated Jameson’s thesis: “the novel is the private history of nations.”