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The Novel and the Nation
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with aporiae with which the great novelists o f the last century did not feel
compelled to contend” {Spectre, 33^) P I f nineteenth-century novels o f the
nation enacted the overcoming o f national divisions or inequalities, read
ers today are more prepared to appreciate the obduracy o f the problems
and obstacles. In the Americas, as elsewhere, we are today all too aware that
the triumph o f the nation involves the conquest or oppression o f indig
enous peoples; but dramatizing their situation in a novel o f the nation is a
matter o f some difficulty, since “we are living in a time when ventriloquiz
ing persecuted and oppressed minorities has become (and not only ethi
cally) intolerable” {Spectre, 335).
Vargas Llosa’s novel might be said to take as an implied point o f ref
erence San Martin’s 1821 proclamation that “in the future the aborigines
shall not be called Indians or natives; they are children and citizens o f Peru
and they shall be known as Peruvians” {Spectre, 193). It has not yet hap
pened, but could it, and if so, at what cost? In dramatizing debates about
the future o f the Indians o f Peru and the impossibility o f satisfactory solu
tions, this novel does not pretend to resolve national differences, as earlier
novels did. Yet, Anderson writes, “that E l Hablador is a nationalist novel is
beyond doubt, but the interesting question is how its nationalism is ‘per
formed’ ” {Spectre, 356).
The narrator o f E l hablador is a cosmopolitan Peruvian writer, living
in Italy, trying to escape his “malhadado pafs”— his “unfortunate” or “ac
cursed” nation. He comes upon an exhibition o f photographs o f a tribe of
Amazonian Indians o f Peru, the Machiguenga, who had obsessed a friend
from his student days, Saul Zuratas. He and Saiil had debated the moral
and political issues concerning the status o f the Indians, and he himself
had come to be haunted by the idea o f this tribe. The narrator speaks of
his past and o f exchanges with Saiil in chapters that alternate with chap
ters presenting the world o f the Machiguenga in the voice o f a tribal sto
ryteller who is not identified but whom readers eventually come to take as
Saiil Zuratas himself
The novel does not account for the presence o f these Machiguenga
23.
For discussion of the novels of nationalist projects by two contempo
rary writers, the Indonesian Pramoedya Ananta Toer, to whom Anderson alludes
{Spectre, 337-38), and the Kenyan Ngugi waThiong’o, see Pheng Cheah, Spectral
Nationality: Passages o f Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
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T H E O R Y
chapters in any way: the narrator has not seen Saiil for two decades, and
while he himself had tried to write about the Machiguenga, each time he
was blocked by
the difficulty of inventing, in Spanish and within a logically consistent intellec
tual framework, a literary form that would suggest, with any reasonable degree
of credibility, how a primitive man with a magico-religious mentality would go
about telling a story. All my attempts led each time to the impasse of a style that
struck me as glaringly false, as implausible as the various ways in which philoso
phers and novelists of the Enlightenment had put words into the mouths of their
exotic characters in the eighteenth century when the theme of the “noble savage”
was fashionable in Europe.^'*
The narrator’s chapters tell o f his debates with Saiil about the Indians, his
own investigations, his failure to write about them, and his growing con
viction that his friend Saiil had, in a process he claims to be unable to
imagine, become the storyteller he is convinced he sees in a photograph o f
the tribe, displayed with others at the spot in Florence where Dante first
glimpsed Beatrice. The other chapters— in a language whose grammar sug
gests a different way o f thinking, a different perception o f time, space, and
individuals— present the lore o f the Machiguengas and, at the end, tales
recognizable in their links to Kafka or the history o f the Jews (Saul was “an
ex-Jew” who knew much o f Kaika by heart). The novel presents no war
rant for these chapters. As Anderson remarks, Vargas Llosa has set himself
the arduous task o f “inventing a persuasive voice for the hablador which is
as remote as possible from that o f any self-imagined Peruvian, yet which
at the same time radically undermines its own authenticity” {Spectre, 355).
The storyteller is supposed to be the voice o f the community, the source
o f its knowledge and its traditions, whose storytelling is “ [sjomething pri
mordial, something that the very existence o f a people may depend on.”^^
Yet in the Americas tales o f indigenous communities have had to emerge
through translations o f the missionaries, anthropologists, or other con
taminating intermediaries, and the novel implicitly comments on this fact
by inventing this figure o f Saul Zuratas, who is a conspicuously dubious
imagined intermediary. One o f the distinctive devices o f the Machiguenga
24. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller, trans. Helen Lane (New York; Pen
guin, 1990), 175-78.
25. Ibid., 94.
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