Peru" that is totally falling apart, headed for a new "war of the end of the world." in which ideologies and blocs confront one another through shadows and puppets, culminating in brutal, meaningless, endless violence.
In tits absurdity and tragedy," the sad and insignificant history of Mayta therefore appears, by contrast, as a premonition," coming as it did before the victory of Castro and the focquista passion of the 1960s. In Vargas Llosa's words, it is an x-ray of the Peruvian misfortune."
The novelist's investigation takes up Mayta at a crossroads in his life, where doubt and faith, enthusiasm and disillusionment, relentlessly confront each other. The narrator works a wrenching process that flows from the crisis of the militant to the crisis of his cause. from the revolutionary to the revolution. By its nature this process involves a choice, a taking of sides. It turns the revolution into a subjective fiction. From the start it downplays the revolution's social and historic necessity.
From fragmented remembrances, the personality of Mayta emerges bit by bit as an intransigent moralist (who at the age 15 carried out an individual and private kind of hunger strike in solidarity with the poor), a dissident by vocation (who broke with the church, then with the Communist Party, and finally with his small Trotskyist group to retreat into his irreducible solitariness.)
He is an "ascetie." a "suicidal" character who refuses to "give in to feelings." which in his own words means to "soften, " to "bend." to "make these small concessions that undermine morale." The very choice of the term is unusual. to "give in to feelings" seems misplaced: is Mayta frustrated, a perverse monk? Everything suggests that.
Vargas Llosa concentrates on Mayta's "selfdestructive tendency." his tendency toward "heresy. toward organic rebellion."
as some one for whom "dissenting" is almost second nature. Vargas seems fascinated by a type of pathology of rebellion. He does not see any need to seriously question the norm because he is dazed by a search for political purity that leads to unreality, to an ultimate level of dissidence, whose source is "more emotional or ethical than ideological."
The radical imperative of the absolute shatters on the trivial, ultra-mundane reality of the real revolution: "a broad patience, an infinite routine, something terribly sordid, with a thousand and one examples of selfishness, a thousand and one villanies. a thousand and one.
By attempting to force the course of historic reality, vision and the imagined history degenerate into totalitarianism. However.
the tragedy of Mayta is that he is not a blind fanatic. but rather an already partially lucid intransigent as shown by his formulas, which parallel those of Vallejos" sister, the nun, who is his companion in arms: "Who told you that faith is incompatible with doubts? or "We lost the false illusions, but not the faith."
Thus: Vargas Llosa again makes the facile analogy between religious faith and political faith, without asking himself about the possible differences between the two. In the final analysis, revolutionary commitment does not take as its starting point any guarantee of a divine character, nor any scientific-type certainty in the future. This itself leaves the individual with full responsibility for his choices and acts: the militant decides his life as a whole on the basis of a reasoned wager and some probabilities. Based on these, he places absolute energy at the service of what are necessarily relative certainties. If you can use the word "faith." this rational faith, which contains neither paradise nor purgatory, has nothing to do with mystical grace.
The "weariness" that Vargas Llosa discovers in an old photo of Mayta is probably the product of a long overhaul over this narrow path. And yet, on this exhausted face is still inscribed this "secret integrity" that causes him "to react: ... against any injustice" and this "righteous conviction that the only unpostponable, the most urgent, task was to change the world."
The confusion of values
Only in the last chapter does Vargas Llosa reveal the last word of the enigma that has run through the whole novel: what is it that was able to grab hold of Mayta's passion, destroy him and reduce him to a ghostly street seller of ice cream? The author maintains that it was not the failure of his short-lived epic nor even the unjustified years of prison. It was the discovery that the revolutionary actions to which he devoted himself to cross the dangerous bridge leading from fiction to reality had lost their political substance and were "objectively" reduced to common crimes.
And Vargas Llosa delivers his message to us: his rejection of subversive violence and of the theories that imprison reality or forcibly mutilate it. The sole solution that Vargas accepts lies in the path of reforms: "It is difficult to admit that the solution might be gradual, that mediocrity is preferable, in terms of reforms, to an absolute perfection that does not exist." And by contrast, Vargas asks himself whether Mayta's "minuscule insurrection is not the start of all those ideologies that present violence as the solution for Latin America" (Le Monde, Nov. 16, 1984). Behind Mayta are not only Marx, Lenin, or Trotsky, but also Guevara. Fonseca, and so many others who are repudiated as promoters of totalitarianism.
Perhaps disenchanted militants of the post- Franco period in Spain might allow themselves to be seduced by the evocation of the alienation of the militant through the case of Mayta. The same thing might happen when the book is published in France.
However, you cannot separate the pieces of Vargas Llosa's reasoning: it is a consistent reasoning that appears in The War of the End of the World. Paradoxically, on the pretext of establishing a realistic policy against a violence that has degenerated to the point of madness, Vargas Llosa's opposition to the reality of ideologies forces him to invent a built-to-order reality that is as imaginary as it is fleeting: democratic institutionalization in Latin America. Since this path is choked off by the crisis. the growing imperialist domination, the daily misery, his counterposition of the reasonable "mediocrity" of reforms to the impossible revolutionay perfection is illusory. To cling to this illusion leads in practice to establishing a rightwing policy.
The literary failure
In contrast to Vargas Llosa's previous novels, by its structure and its conclusion Historia de Mayta explicitly assumes a political and esthetic manifesto, which is perfectly summarized in the interview in Le Monde: "At the same time, it is a novel about fiction: fiction in literature, fiction in politics. Positive fiction and negative fiction. Positive fiction is literary fiction, one that recognizes itself as such, that invents, that surpasses reality and creates a different reality that consoles you. Negative fiction is fiction that does not recognize itself as such, that claims to be the truth, the rational description of reality.
But this novel itself illustrates the failure of the attempt. Whatever might be its interest, it is a poor novel. Vargas Llosa stumbles over a literary endeavor that has no known solution: to bring the modern revolutionary militant into literature.
In their mythical abstraction, the characters of Antonio Conselheiro and his cangaçeiro chiefs took on a powerful reality in The War of the End of the World. Each in his way appeared with epic presence. By contrast. Mayta remains a vague. unintegrated silhouette: we