REVIEWS:POLITICS AND POST-MODERNISM

...But Vargas Llosa would seem to suggest that idealism and utopianism ought to be susceptible to judgment in the way that more ordinary and pragmatic approaches to reality have been...

...A member of a splinter party with seven members, Alejandro Mayta has had reason to feel disappointed...

...Hygiene, above all...

...and it is that same naiveté that permits him to summon something like the old intensity when, at age 65, he tells our narrator about the food kiosk he ran with a friend amidst the squalor of the unspeakable Lurigancho prison...

...To be confronted so steadily with filth and wretchedness is in fact to suspect that political categories are inadequate to comprehend what is happening in places like Peru...

...Later, when there were outbreaks of guerrilla fighting in the mountains and the jungle in 1963, 1964, 1965, and 1966—all inspired by the Cuban Revolution— no newspaper remembered that the forerunner of those attempts to raise up the people in armed struggle to establish socialism in Peru had been that minor episode, rendered ghostlike by the years, which had taken place in Jauja province...

...Mayta himself may not inspire revulsion, but the spectacle of his failure and the humiliation of his hope is rarely edifying...

...We washed the knives, forks, and spoons, the glasses, and the plates before and after they were used...

...If there is a vision at work in this novel—so we may want to feel—it is the vision of a novelist...

...Here, beyond the prestidigitations of Vargas Llosa's post-modern narrative procedures, is some semblance of the sentiment that unites the authornarrator with his protagonist...

...What emerges so forcefully, rather, is a powerful sentiment of disgust focused not only on the trappings of the place but on its inhabitants...

...Still in Quero, he wants us to note that the lady of the house probably sleeps with her animals, that she has no doubt been wearing the same skirt for many years, and that it has probably been many years "since she had washed herself...

...The conflicting accounts of Mayta offered by this person or that we can explain by speaking of their needs or their limited perspectives...

...We won the respect of the whole place...

...he could certainly have provided a more ample historical perspective, going back before the 1950s to discover what made revolutionary agitation seem attractive to so many people in his country...

...We even set up a kind of bank, because a lot of cons gave us their money for safekeeping.' " Perhaps naiveté is not the word with which to describe the quality of character involved in these passages...

...Eighty pages later, when we read, "He saw them multiplying like the loaves of bread in the Bible, every day recruiting scores of boys as poor and selfdenying as themselves," or "the assault on heaven, I thought...

...So, too, will the reader feel that he or she chooses from among conflicting possibilities so as to create characters whose identity will nonetheless remain ambiguous...

...There is much to be said for such an approach...

...It is the special purpose of Vargas Llosa's novel to make the impulses of a Mayta seem both misguided and inevitable...

...To conclude that Mayta has no identity, no character, simply because there are unanswerable questions associated with his conduct, is to ignore how much is revealed...

...but we feel all the same that his games have a purpose, even if we cannot always say with certainty what it is...

...Insofar as his motives seem to us idealistic and he proceeds to act without any taint of self-importance, he will seem to us an embodiment of an inevitable and largely attractive will to change...

...If he wished to inquire, as he did in the earlier novel Conversation in The Cathedral, "When did Peru get fucked over...

...ALREADY A NUMBER OF REVIEWERS HAVE described The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta as a more or less standard post-modern novel which creates narrative obstacles only for the pleasure involved in overcoming them...

...In the face of such facts, never really subject to rational discussion, the activist impulses of a Mayta can only seem misguided (which is to say, without reasonable hope of success), or inevitable (a necessary expression of a desire for drastic change which cannot be impugned by recalling that it had no reasonable expectation of success...

...But he would seem to suggest that those who cannot do justice to Mayta will not know how to think about politics or the future...

...As things stand in Vargas Llosa's novel, it is hard not to feel that we have been given contradictory signals: on the one hand, a situation that is ripe for revolution...

...a thousand and one vile deeds," and so on...

...The author of such a work insists on his own duplicity so as to assert, in Vargas Llosa's words, the author's "enormous deicidal will for the destruction and reconstruction of reality...

...THE NARRATOR IN VARGAS LLOSA'S NOVEL is a writer who is clearly intended to remind us of the public figure Vargas Llosa has become...

...He may play tricks on us, carefully establishing a character's identity only to reveal at last that we were misled...

...Mayta, after all, late in the novel remarks not only that he is no longer involved in politics but that "politics gave me up...

...But this doesn't alter the fact that Mayta remains in many respects an appealing person...

...The central figure is an old-line Trotskyist disappointed in the merely theoretic communism he's pursued for twenty years...

...It may not provide the key to the political vision of the novel, but it does suggest the kind of thing to which the novel most warmly responds...

...Even those who are most sensible and sophisticated, like the intellectual in charge of a progressive development center, have little to offer apart from a knowing disdain for visionary intensity and a capacity to thread their way between partisans of the left and the right...

...What happened, what might have happened, and what is likely to happen are accorded equivalent status, and the authornarrator's desire to get at the truth is explicitly confounded with the need for a plausible basis on which to fabulate and embellish...

...What is worse, this first Peruvian Marxist uprising and subsequent small- or large-scale insurrections have inspired nothing but a further cycle of repression and brutality...

...EVALUATED SIMPLY IN TERMS OF CONSEQUENCE, Mayta is undeniably a failure, his revolutionary aspirations clearly hopeless...

...For if Mayta is at forty still a naif, he never seems to us a fool or without the capacity to surprise us...

...Vargas Llosa's narrator, who closely resembles the novelist himself, reconstructs the story of the long forgotten Mayta and his abortive insurrection by means of interviews with those who knew Mayta in the 1950s...

...Our attention to character and to its elusive relation with politics will rather lead us to ask whether the novel adds up, whether its devices have something to do with its purpose...

...Those who would draw such a conclusion would then have to feel that for Vargas Llosa there is a plain truth which the novel is after, that underlying all the complex authorial derring-do there is a simple narrative of naive revolutionary aspiration and inevitable disappointment...

...In fact, as already intimated, it is difficult to say that there is a politics in this novel beyond its elaboration of attitudes which in another work might have informed a more focused vision...

...So intent is our narrator upon his inquiry into Mayta and, more especially, into Mayta's abortive revolutionary gesture, that we cannot but feel he believes in the truth his exertions will uncover...

...The notion that for such a narrator, as for Vargas Llosa himself, the traditional idea of character has been abandoned is at once plausible and misleading...

...We boiled the water for making fruit juice, for coffee, for everything...

...Is this what the narrator wants us to admire when he gives us Mayta imagining the aftermath of his little insurrection: "the working class would shake off its lethargy, all the reformist deceptions, all its corrupt leaders, all those illusions of being able to coexist 374 with the sell-outs, and would join the struggle...

...One way or the other, is the feeling evoked merely pathetic...

...Though he is something of a "possibilitarian"— Robert Musil's word describes a person who cannot forget that things can easily have been other than they are—his words have a gravity about them that belies the seeming arbitrariness of his novelistic invention...

...With the Latin American novel that purpose is usually taken to include the setting out of a political conflict...

...For the reader of Vargas Llosa's novel there is no way to ask whether Mayta might have gone about the business of changing his society in another way, say, by embracing some form of parliamentary democracy and strenuously working towards that ideal...

...The insurrection he leads is rapidly broken up, his chief cohort is shot and killed, and Mayta spends many years in prison...

...The views of Vargas Llosa as 372 expressed in his latest journalistic contribution to the New York Times Sunday Magazine may interest us in various ways, but they can have little to do with the vision of the novelist, whose business is to ask questions rather than to promote a position...

...That disgust, we cannot but note, is accompanied neither by qualification nor apology...

...Vargas Llosa's novel deals with an incident that actually occurred in Peru in 1962, though he sets the events in 1958, before the consolidation of Castro's revolution in Cuba, so as to make more palpable the audacity of Mayta's insurrection...

...Nothing we hear about him in the various interviews conducted by the author-narrator can quite dislodge from our minds that initial, powerful image of the man...

...Vargas Llosa here affirms a traditional conception of character by forcing us to acknowledge that we know these people, indeed, that we can judge them by considering motive, circumstance, and consequence, quite as we would if we were working at a more conventional narrative...

...His absorption in Mayta of course tells us more about him than anything else, quite in the way that Mayta's obsessions largely define his identity...

...They'd shit right here, between the stove and the bed...

...None of his homosexual exploits, for example, can at all tarnish the image of the somewhat juvenile idealist, and it matters little to our ultimate sense of Mayta that the vivid accounts of him as a practicing homosexual are later repudiated...

...But it is the novelist as gamesman and master strategist who most frequently emerges from accounts of the present work...

...Is this intended to suggest that he is too good for politics, or, more broadly, that politics cannot finally address what is most real in our lives...

...Does it clarify matters to recall that Mayta's delusions are explored again and again in the novel, that the narrator is routinely at pains to remind us that Mayta "let his imagination run wild," and that Mayta's optimism strikes most of his acquaintances as incomprehensible or ludicrous...

...But the author-narrator has a perspective that by definition cannot be limited in the same way, encompassing as it does the full range of sentiments and motives expressed in the novel...

...Some will speak of all this as part of the author's apocalyptic vision, reading the signs as a warning of the disaster that is about to befall Peru as it has already befallen other countries in the region...

...But it is one thing to project possibility without motive or consequence, another to insist that there are always motives and consequences, however difficult they may be to assemble...

...This is not to suggest that the only good motives are those that lead more or less inevitably to the accomplishment of reasonable ends...

...We try to determine what matters to him, and we conclude at last that we know enough about him to reject certain possibilities and to emphasize others...

...When we think of the narrator himself, we consider not only his duplicities and stratagems but his character...

...If as the novel progresses he seems less and less the intellectual we had perhaps taken him for, he remains in important respects the person we thought we admired earlier, and might still admire at novel's end...

...That such judgments are not easy to arrive at or to trust we discover again and again as we try to get a definitive fix on Mayta...

...No attempt is made to justify the insurrection by providing a detailed account of Peruvian politics in the 1950s...

...No such awful conclusion is drawn in this novel, but it is hard not to feel that the novelistic intelligence shaping the material has barely managed to resist it...

...For all of the novelist's oft-repeated insistence that "all fictions are lies" and that we can never know anything with certainty, he cannot but affirm that there is something in Mayta which continues to compel and attract...

...His one attempt to break out of the sterile round of ideological disputation and ineffectual pamphleteering was a minor revolutionary action that had no real chance of succeeding and that cost Mayta all the political friends he'd had...

...Flies, lice, and a thousand other bugs must be part of the poor furniture...

...What is striking in the handful of pages devoted to Quero is not the quality of the political ideas brought forward or the revelation of character facilitated by the protagonist's reflections...

...We created a genuine revolution,' he assures me with pride...

...Early in the novel he emerges as a genuine priest of revolution, an ascetic with a vocation, obsessed with the sufferings of the poor and "capable of reacting with the same indignation to any injustice...

...The evidence, in other words, suggests not only that Mayta was unable to foresee the consequences of his actions, but that motives in isolation from the capacity to think clearly and consequentially are not to be judged as good motives at all...

...If this seems doubtful, a passage near the end of the novel may help to clarify what may be taken to be a proper attitude to Mayta...

...He lives in an already dilapidated "new town" in the shadow of the prison in which he spent many years of his adult life...

...The setting alternates between the Peru 371 of the late 1950s and the Peru of the near future...

...To say that a book of a certain kind adds up is usually only to say that its various parts cohere and collectively underwrite an overarching purpose...

...They rest there for two hours before continuing their flight from government troops sent to bring them back to be punished for revolutionary crimes against the state...

...If, as his narrator has it, "Peru's going down the drain," mightn't it be the case that there's no help for it, or worse, that the people almost deserve what they've got...

...OSTENSIBLY VARGAS LLOSA HAS WRITTEN a political novel...

...As readers we are only in a position to consider the motives of the character and the palpable consequences of projects like the one he undertakes...

...Compare him with alternative figures who lucidly criticize his naivete and his gift for defeat...

...It is Mayta's naivete, after all, that permits him to conclude in his one year at the university "that the professors had lost their love of teaching somewhere along the line...

...WHAT CONTINUALLY COMPLICATES OUR VIEW OF Mayta is what we take to be the inconclusiveness of Vargas Llosa's feelings and intentions...

...on the other hand, a portrayal of revolutionary ambition that makes it seem alternately cynical or childish, and always futile...

...And if at midnight they had to shit...

...Elsewhere in the book there are many references to the mountains of garbage threatening to overwhelm the city of Lima, and to middle-class citizens who grow so accustomed to it that they no longer notice what has become of their neighborhoods...

...Neither is our sense of his somewhat sophomoric enthusiasm diminished by those passages in which he reflects with a grave sobriety on revolution as "a long act of patience...

...But if this is a sorry spectacle, we are admonished, consider the people who live in this filth: "If they had to pee at night, they probably wouldn't feel like getting up and going outside...

...We know" as we read that politics in Peru has everything to do with ill health, malnutrition, terrorism, corruption, military dictatorship, and the relationship between various despots and the United States marines...

...Again, it is hard to be sure precisely what Vargas Llosa would want us to feel about this...

...But even in this passage we suspect that Vargas Llosa wants to admire Mayta's optimism more than he can bring himself to do, that the impulse to caricature is as strong as the impulse to celebrate...

...Neither does Vargas Llosa at all go over the failure of democracy in Peru in the late 1960s or the coming to power of the military "revolutionary experiment" at that time...

...They are part of an undifferentiated given, the more or less unarguable facts of life...

...But more than a prediction of political or social disorder is at issue in the imagery that so pervades this novel...

...What may have seemed simply a portrait of the revolutionary as idealist is also the portrait of a dreamer dangerously yielding to a vision that has taken possession of him utterly...

...This is not an isolated passage in Vargas Llosa's novel...

...Obviously, there are grounds for despair in this narrative outline...

...In these terms, Vargas Llosa may be said to make common cause with those who read him as if he were a contemporary Latin American follower of Vladimir Nabokov, measuring his success by his willingness to use "to the hilt" the narrative instruments he elects...

...It is legitimate to wonder precisely what Vargas Llosa hoped to accomplish in this novel, indeed, to wonder whether Vargas Llosa knew quite what he was after in a work that is full of misleading details and false starts...

...Today no one remembers who took part in it...

...If The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is a novel of politics, we may feel, it is also a work that refuses to endorse any programmatic reading of its material...

...I n the new novel by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa there is an arresting sequence in which the protagonist and his revolutionary comrades stop at the ancient mountain community of Quero...

...In such a work, some reviewers have said, we are necessarily reminded "that art is as arbitrary as truth is relative" and that "life itself is a moment by moment invention...

...Does this mean that Vargas Llosa's narrative procedures are merely a smoke-screen designed to conceal the conventionality of his purpose...

...Character in this novel is always a primary concern, the key to what may be said about the validity of an enterprise...

...All the houses in Quero had to be like that," we read: "no light, no running water, no drainage, and no bath...

...Perhaps it is the absence of cynicism, the inexplicable intensity of resolution...

...If the carefully deposited signs of filth and degradation in the novel do not finally add up as we expect them to, neither do the indications that the book is to be read as a political or historical inquiry...

...If we say that he maintains—through all of the changes Mayta's portrait is made to undergo—a consistent affection for Mayta, and that this affection is more than the novelist's love of a creation upon whom he can project anything he likes, then we have still to say what it is he admires...

...In sum, we know relatively little about him, but we have reason to believe that he is not a frivolous man...

...373 The atmosphere of Peru in the near future of the novel makes us feel that all manner of awfulness has occurred...

...By the end of the novel we see Mayta as a sixty-five-year old man whose chief desire is to keep himself and his family afloat and whose principal dream is of escape to another country...

...A revolution, you bet...

...The impulse to honor—with whatever misgivings— whatever is authentic in Mayta's passion for social justice is the center of Vargas Llosa's novel and the substance of the meaning that abides...

...The Peru of the near future is, if anything, in worse shape than it was when Mayta was young...

...Would they have enough energy to go out into the darkness and the cold, the wind and the rain...

...Insofar as his thinking is revealed as inadequate to the magnitude of the forces arrayed against him, he will seem disappointing...

...But so obviously is there no such plain truth, no such schematic narrative program in this novel that one cannot but concede the futility of attempting to formulate conclusions in a neatly edifying or chastening way...

...Poorer citizens are described as "resigned," not only to the garbage, which they routinely throw out of their houses, but to such emblems of crime and disorder as "a decapitated body" lying untended in the street...

...Kierkegaard's fear—that if everything is possible and every "fact" subject to sudden contradiction, then nothing is true—does not do justice to our sense of this work...

...Perhaps it is Mayta's capacity to hope, to defy reality...

...Though the apparent subject of the book is Mayta and the unsuccessful uprising in which he participated, we are so often reminded of Mayta's fictional status and of the author-narrator's literary exertions that we might well think it chiefly important to concern ourselves with the creative impulse itself...

...If we are occasionally irritated by the liberties he takes and puzzled by his desire to sabotage his own credibility, we are nonetheless confident that for him certain things are real, the desire to know what they are genuine and, in its way, admirable...

...But issues of the sort that Vargas Llosa will debate in public meetings or in newspaper articles are not a part of the texture of the novel...

...The advantage of such an approach—apart from the fact that it may answer directly to Vargas Llosa's intentions—is that it forces us to treat a novel as a novel, that it dismisses as trivial or irrelevant questions of historical accuracy that may only confuse our responses as readers...

...Here I think we must answer that it is not...

...No doubt, as John Updike has aptly noted, "the intelligence of Mario Vargas Llosa plays above the sad realities and unrealities with a coolness that should be distinguished from Nabokov's hermetically aesthetic ardor...

...In no way reducible to a disembodied voice speaking arbitrary words, he seems everywhere to feel that things have weight, that there is such a thing as a necessity to which even the most playful imagination is responsible...

...Tempted like the rest of us to come at problems of poverty, inequality, and tyranny with the vocabulary of revolution, reaction, and reform, the novelist also seems more than a little tempted by the thought that politics inevitably misses the point...

...If he wished to say, simply, that there is no hope for improvement in countries like Peru, he certainly could have examined the consequences of that observation more rigorously than he chose to...

...The novel reads like a post-modern work, moving rapidly and often without transition from one time plane to another, mingling past and present so dexterously as to subdue them to a single, almost undifferentiated texture...

...They pee right here, next to the bed where they sleep and the stove where they cook...

...If the mountains of garbage swallowing the landscape of Vargas Llosa's Peru have something to tell us about his vision of the country and its people, then surely Mayta's revolutionary pride cannot be dismissed so easily...

...375...

...and in the detail Vargas Llosa supplies, relentlessly, there is more than reason for disgust...

...He is also attracted to a wide range of ideas...

...Obviously the absence of linear narrative will entitle the reader to feel to some extent like a participant in the piecing together of the story...

...As we confront the futility of Mayta's enterprise and its delusional component, we are left with an uneasy sense of not knowing quite what we feel or why we have been taken through Mayta's adventures...

...If, on the other hand, he wished simply to settle old scores with a Latin American left that has often seemed not to know what it was doing, he could surely have made things easier for himself by creating a less likeable protagonist than Mayta and by portraying the conditions of life in Peru as requiring something less than total renovation...

...Like other thoughtful persons, he is interested in the fate of his country and knows a good deal about its history...

...We shall bring heaven down from heaven, establish it on earth," we cannot but feel that the gap between Mayta's optimism and the reality he confronts is an essential component of the portrait...

...But the novel furnishes no way to talk about these issues...